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The Land of Contrasts 



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The 



Land of Contrasts 



A Briton s View of his American Kin 



By 



James FuUarton Muirhead 

Author of Baedeker'' s Handbooks to Great Britaifi 
and the United States 



VTCRESCIT 






f 






_ 



Lamson, Wolffe and Company 

Boston, New York and London 
MDCCCXCVIIT. 



Copyright, 1898 
By Lamson, Wolffe and Company 

All rights reserved 




ncocOflESRECEJVEi). 



BOSTON, U.S.A. 



2nd COPY, 
1893. 



To 

' Land 
1 rjuL rjiis given me 
What makes Life most worth living 



Contents 



Chapter 

I. Introductory ...... 

II. The Land of Contrasts .... 

III. Lights and Shadows of American Society 

IV. An Appreciation of the American Woman 
Y. The American Ohikl .... 

VI. International Misapprehensions and National 
Differences ..... 

VII. Sports and Amusements 

VIII. The Humour of the ^^ Man on the ('ars" 

IX. American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 

X. Some Literary Straws .... 

XI. C'Crtain Features of Certain CJities . 

XII. Baedekeriana ..... 

XIII. The American Note .... 



Page 

1 

7 
24 
45 
G3 

74 
106 
128 
143 
162 
190 
219 
273 



Author's Note 

MY first visit to tlie United States of America 
— a sliort one — was paid in 1888. The 
observations on which this Look is mainly 
based were, however, made in 1890-93, when 
I spent nearly three years in the country, engaged in 
the preparation of " Baedeker's Handbook to the United 
States." My work led me into almost every State and 
Territor}^ in the Union, and brought me into direct 
contact with representatives of practically every class. 
The book was almost wholly written in what leisure I 
could find for it in 1895 and 1896. The foot-notes, 
added on my third visit to the country (1898), while 
I was seeing the chapters through the press, have at 
least this significance, that they show how rapidly 
things change in the Land of Contrasts. 

No part of the book has been previously published, 
except some ten pages or so, which appeared in the 
Arena for July, 1892. Most of the matter in this arti- 
cle has been incorporated in Chapter II. of the present 
volume. 

So far as the book has any general intention, my aim 
has been, while not ignoring the defects of American 



viii Author's Note, 



civilisation, to dwell rather on those features in which, 
as it seems to me, John Bull may learn from Brother 
Jonathan. I certainly have not had so much trouble 
in finding these features as seems to have been the case 
witli many other British critics of America. My sojourn 
in tlie United States has been full of benefit and stimu- 
lus to myself; and I should like to believe that my 
American readers will see that this book is substantially 
a tribute of admiration and gratitude. 

J. F. M. 



Introductory 

IT is not everyone's business, nor would it be every- 
one's pleasure, to visit the United States of 
America. More, perhaps, than in any other country 
that I know of will what the traveller finds there 
depend on what he brings with him. Preconception will 
easily fatten into a perfect mammoth of realisation ; but 
the open mind will add immeasurably to its garner of 
interests and experiences. It may be ^' but a colourless 
crowd of barren life to the dilettante — a poisonous field 
of clover to the cynic " (Martin Morris) ; but he to 
whom man is more than art will easily find his 
account in a visit to the American Republic. The man 
whose bent of mind is distinctly conservative, to whom 
innovation always suggests a presumption of deteriora- 
tion, will probably be much more irritated than inter- 
ested by a peregrination of the Union. Tlie Englishman 
who is wedded to his own ideas, and whose conception 
of comfort and pleasure is bounded by the way they do 
things at home, may be goaded almost to madness by 
tlie gnat-stings of American readjustments — and all the 
more because he cannot adopt the explanation that they 
are the natural outcome of an alien blood and a foreign 
tongue. If he expects the same servility from his " in- 
feriors " that he has been accustomed to at home, his 
relations with them will be a series of electric shocks ; 
nay, his very expectation of it will exasi)erate the 
American and make liim show his very Avorst side. 



Introductory 



The stately English dame must let her amusement out- 
weigh her resentment if she is addressed as " grandma " 
by some genial railway conductor of the West ; she may 
feel assured^ that no impertinence is intended. 

The lover of scenery who expects to see a Jungfrau 
float into his ken before he has lost sight of a Mte. Rosa 5 
the architect who expects to find the railway time-table 
punctuated at hourly intervals by a venerable monument 
of his art ; the connoisseur who hopes to visit a Pitti 
Palace or a Dresden Picture Gallery in every large city ; 
the student who counts on finding almost every foot of 
ground soaked with historic gore and every building hal- 
lowed by immemorial association ; the sociologist who 
looks for different customs, costumes, and language at 
every stage of his journey ; — each and all of these will 
do well to refrain his foot from the soil of the United 
States. On the other hand, the man who is interested 
in the workings of civilisation under totally new condi- 
tions ; who can make allowances, and quickly and easily 
readjust his mental attitude ; who has learned to let the 
new comforts of a new country make up, temporarily at 
least, for the loss of the old ; Avho finds nothing alien to 
liim that is human, and has a genuine love for mankind ; 
who can appreciate the growth of general comfort at 
the expense of caste ; who delights in promising experi- 
ments in politics, sociology, and education ; who is not 
thrown off his balance by the shifting of the centre of 
gravity of honour and distinction ; who, in a word, is 
not congealed by conventionality, but is ready to accept 
novelties on their merits, — he, unless I am very griev- 
ously mistaken, will find compensations in the United 
States that will go far to make up for Swiss Alp and 



Introductory 



Italian lake, for Gothic cathedral and Palladian palace, 
for historic charters and time-honoured tombs, for paint- 
ings by Raphael and statues by Phidias. 

Perhaps, in the last analysis, our appreciation of 
America will depend on whether we are optimistic or 
pessimistic in regard to the great social problem which 
is formed of so many smaller problems. If we think 
that the best we can do is to preserve what we have, 
America will be but a series of disappointments. If, 
however, we believe that man's sympathies for others 
will grow deeper, that his ingenuity will ultimately be 
equal to at least a partial solution of the social question, 
we shall watch the seething of the American crucible 
with intensest interest. The solution of the social prob- 
lem, speaking broadly, must imply that each man must in 
some direction, simple or complex, work for his own 
livelihood. Equality will always be a word for fools 
and doctrinaires to conjure with, but those who believe 
in man's sympathy for man must have faith that some 
day relative human justice will be done, which will be 
as far beyond the justice of to-day as light is from dark.^ 
And it would be hard to say where we are to look for 
this consummation if not in the United States of America, 
which " has been the home of the poor and the eccentric 
from all parts of the world, and has carried their poverty 
and passions on its stalwart young shoulders." We may 
visit the United States, like M. Bourget, pour reprendre 
un pen de foi dans le lendemain de civilisation. 

The paragraph on a previous page is not meant to 
imply that the United States are destitute of scenic, 
artistic, picturesque, and historic interest. The worst 

1 1 have some suspicion that this ought to be in quotation marks, but cannot 
now trace the passage. 



Introductory 



that can be said of American scenery is tliat its best 
points are separated by long intervals; the best can 
hardly be put too strongly. Places like the Yosemite 
Valley (of which Mr. Emerson said that it was the only 
scenery he ever saw where " the reality came up to the 
brag"), the Yellowstone Park, Niagara, and the stupen- 
dous Caiion of the Colorado River amply make good their 
worldwide reputation ; but there are innumerable other 
places less known in Europe, such as the primeval woods 
and countless lakes of the Adirondacks, the softer 
beauties of the Berkshire Hills, the Hudson (that 
grander American Rhine), the Swiss-like White Moun- 
tains, the Catskills, the mystic Ocklawaha of Florida, 
and the Black Mountains of Carolina that would amply 
repay the easy trouble of an Atlantic passage under 
modern conditions. The historic student, too, will find 
much that is worthy of his attention, especially in the 
older Eastern States ; and will, perhaps, be surprised to 
realise how relative a term antiquity is. In a short time 
he will find himself looking at an American building of 
the seventeenth century Avith as much reverence as if it 
had been a contemporary of the Plantagenets ; and, 
indeed, if antiquity is to be determined by change and 
development rather than by mere flight of time, the two 
centuries of New York will hold their own with a cycle 
of Cathay. It is, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes re- 
marked to the present Avriter, like the different thermo- 
metrical scales ; it does not take very long to realise that 
twenty-five degrees of Reaumur mean as great a heat as 
ninety degrees of Fahrenheit. Such a city as Boston 
amply justifies its inclusion in a " Historic Towns " series, 
along with London and Oxford ; and it is by no means 



Introductory 



a singular instance. Even the lover of art will not find 
America an absolute Sahara. To say nothing of the 
many masterpieces of European painters that have found 
a resting-place in America, where there is at least one 
public picture gallery and several private ones of the 
first class, the best efforts of American painters, and 
perhaps still more those of American sculptors, are full 
of suggestion and charm; while I cannot believe that 
the student of modern architecture will anywhere find a 
more interesting field than among the enterprising and 
original works of the American school of architecture. 

This book Avill be grievously misunderstood if it is 
supposed to be in any way an attempt to cover, even 
sketchily, the whole ground of American civilisation, or 
to give anything like a coherent appreciation of it. In 
the main it is merely a record of personal impressions, 
a series of notes upon matters which happened to come 
under my personal observation and to excite my personal 
interest. Not only the conditions under which I visited 
the country, but also my own disqualifications of taste 
and knowledge, have prevented me from more than 
touching on countless topics, such as the phenomena of 
politics, religion, commerce, and industry, which would 
naturally find a place in any complete account of 
America. I have also tried to avoid, so far as possible, 
describing well-known scenery, or in other ways going 
over the tracks of my predecessors. The phenomena 
of the United States are so momentous in themselves 
that the observation of them from any new standpoint 
cannot be wholly destitute of value ; while they change 
so rapidly that he would be unobservant indeed who 
could not find something new to chronicle. 



Introductory 



It is important, also, to remember that the generalisa- 
tions of this book apply in very few cases to the whole 
extent of the United States. I shall be quite contented 
if any one section of the country thinks that I cannot 
mean it in such-and-such an assertion, provided it allows 
that the cap fits some other portion of the great com- 
munity. As a rule, however, it may be assumed that 
unqualified references to American civilisation relate to 
it as crystallised in such older communities as New 
York or Philadelphia, not to the fermenting process of 
life-in-the-making on the frontier. 

In the comparisons between Great Britain and the 
United States I have tried to oppose only those classes 
which substantially correspond to each other. Thus, in 
contrasting the Lowell manufacturer, the Hampshire 
squire, the Virginian planter, and the Manchester man, 
it must not be forgotten that the first and the last have 
many points of difference from the second and third 
which are not due to their geographical position. Many 
of the instances on which my remarks are based may 
undoubtedly be called extreme ; but even extreme cases 
are suggestive, if not exactly typical. There is a breed 
of poultry in Japan, in which, by careful cultivation, 
the tail-feathers of the cock sometimes reach a length of 
ten or even fifteen feet. This is not precisely typical of 
the gallinaceous species ; but it is none the less a phe- 
nomenon which might be mentioned in a comparison 
with the apteryx. 

Finally, I ought perhaps to say, with Mr. E. A. Free- 
man, that I sometimes find it almost impossible to be- 
lieve that the whole nation can be so good as the people 
who have been so good to me. 



II 

The Land of Contrasts 

WHEN I first thought of writing about the 
United States at all, I soon came to the con- 
clusion that no title could better than the 
above express the general impression left 
on my mind l)y my experiences in the Great Republic. 
It m-ay well be that a long list of inconsistencies might 
be made out for any country, just as for any individual ; 
but so far as my knowledge goes the United States stands 
out as preeminently the '' Land of Contrasts " — the land 
of stark, staring, and stinuilating inconsistency ; at 
once the home of enlightenment and the happy hunting 
ground of the charlatan and the quack ; a land in which 
nothing happens but the unexpected ; the home of Hy- 
perion, but no less the haunt of the satyr ; always the 
land of promise, but not invariably the land of perform- 
ance ; a land which may be bounded by the aurora bore- 
alis, but which has also undeniable acquaintance with 
the flames of the bottondess pit ; a land which is laved 
at once by the rivers of Paradise and the leaden waters 
of Acheron. 

If I proceed to enumerate a few of the actual contrasts 
that struck me, in matters both weighty and trivial, it is 
not merely as an exercise in antithesis, but because I 
hope it will show how easy it would be to pass an entirely 
and even ridiculously untrue judgment upon the United 

7 



8 The Land of Contrasts 

States by liaving an eye only for one series of the start- 
Ung opposites. It sliould show in a very concrete way 
one of the most fertile sources of those unfair interna- 
tional judgments which led the French Academician 
Joiiy to the statement : " Plus on reflechit et plus on 
observe, plus on se convainct de la faussete de la plu- 
part de ces jugements portes sur un nation entiere par 
quelques ecrivains et adoptes sans examen par les 
autres." The Americans themselves can hardly take 
umbrage at the label, if Mr. Howells truly represents 
them when he makes one of the characters in ''A 
Traveller from Altruria " assert that they pride them- 
selves even on the size of their inconsistencies. The 
extraordinary clashes that occur in the United States are 
doubtless largely due to the extraordinary mixture of 
youth and age in the character of the country. If ever 
an old head was set upon young shoulders, it was in this 
case of the United States — this '' Strange New World, 
thet yit was never young." While it is easy, in a study 
of the United States, to see the essential truth of the 
analogy between the youth of an individual and the 
youth of a State, we must also remember tliat America 
was in many respects born full-grown, like Athena from 
the brain of Zeus, and coordinates in the most extraor- 
dinary way the shrewdness of the sage with the naivete 
of the child. Those who criticise the United States 
because, with the experience of all the ages behind her, 
she is in some points vastly defective as compared with 
the nations of Europe are as much mistaken as those 
who look to her for the fresh ingenuousness of youth 
unmarred by an}- trace of age's weakness. It is simply 
inevitable that she should share the vices as well as the 



The Land of Contrasts 



virtues of both. Mr. Freeman has well pointed out how 
natural it is that a colony should rush ahead of the mother 
country in some things and lag behind it in others ; and 
that just as you have to go to French Canada if you want 
to see Old France, so, for many things, if you wish to 
see Old England you must go to New England. 

Thus America may easily be abreast or ahead of us 
in such matters as the latest applications of electricity, 
while retaining in its legal uses certain cumbersome 
devices that we have long since discarded. Americans 
still have " Courts of Oyer and Terminer " and still 
insist on the unanimity of the jury, though their judges 
wear no robes and their counsel apply to tlie cuspidor 
as often as to the code. So, too, the extension of munic- 
ipal powers accomplished in Great Britain still seems a 
formidable innovation in the United States. 

The general feeling of power and scope is probably 
another fruitful source of the inconsistencies of Ameri- 
can life. Emerson has well said that consistency is the 
hobgoblin of little minds ; and no doubt the largeness, 
the illimitable outlook, of the national mind of the 
United States makes it disregard surface discrepancies 
that would grate horribly on a more conventional com- 
munity. The confident belief that all will come out 
right in the end, and that harmony can be attained 
when time is taken to consider it, carries one triumphantly 
over the roughest places of inconsistency. It is easy to 
drink our champagne from tin cans, when we know that 
it is merely a sense of hurry that prevents us fetching 
the chased silver goblets waiting for our use. 

This, I fancy, is the explanation of one series of con- 
trasts which strikes an Englishman at once. America 



lo The Land of Contrasts 

claims to be the hmd of hberty par excellence, and in a 
wholesale way this may be true in spite of the gap be- 
tween the noble sentiments of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and the actual treatment of the negro and the 
Chinaman. But in what may be called the retail traffic 
of life the American puts up with innumerable restric- 
tions of his personal liberty. Max O'Rell has expatiated 
with scarcely an exaggeration on the wondrous sight of 
a powerful millionaire standing meekly at the door of a 
hotel dining-room until the consequential head-waiter 
(very possibly a coloured gentleman) condescends to 
point out to him the seat he may occupy. So, too, such 
petty officials as policemen and railway conductors are 
generally treated rather as the mastei-s than as the ser- 
vants of the public. The ordinary American citizen 
accepts a long delay on the railway or an interminable 
" wait " at the theatre as a direct visitation of Provi- 
dence, against which it would be useless folly to direct 
cat-calls, grumbles, or letters to the Times. Americans 
invented the slang word " kicker," but so far as I could 
see their vocabulary is here miles ahead of their prac- 
tice ; they dream noble deeds, but do not do them ; 
Englishmen "kick" much better, without having a 
name for it. The right of the individual to do as he 
will is respected to such an extent that an entire com- 
pany will put up with inconvenience rather than infringe 
it. A coal-carter will calmly keep a tramway-car wait- 
ing several minutes until he finishes his unloading. The 
conduct of the train-boy, as described in Chapter XII., 
would infallibly lead to assault and battery in England, 
but hardly elicits an objurgation in America, where the 
right of one sinner to bang a door outweighs the desire 



The Land of Contrasts ii 

of twenty just persons for a quiet nap. On the other 
hand, the old Puritan spirit of interference with indi- 
vidual liberty sometimes crops out in America in a 
way that would be impossible in this country. An 
inscription in one of the large mills at Lawrence, Mass., 
informs the employees (or did so some years ago) 
that '' regular attendance at some place of woi-ship 
and a proper observance of the Sabbath will be expected 
of every person employed." So, too, the young women 
of certain ^districts impose on their admirers such restric- 
tions in the use of liquor and tobacco that any less 
patient animal than the native American would infal- 
libly kick over the traces. 

In spite of their acknowledged nervous energy and 
excitability, Americans often show a good deal of a 
quality that rivals the phlegm of the Dutch. Their 
above-mentioned patience during railway or other delays 
is an instance of this. So, in the incident related in 
Chapter XII. the passenger in the inside coach retained 
their seats throughout the whole experiment. Their 
resemblance in such cases as this to placid domestic kine 
is enhanced — out West — by the inevitable champing of 
tobacco or chewing-gum, than which nothing I know 
of so robs the human countenance of the divine spark 
of intelligence. Boston men of business, after being 
whisked by the electric car from their suburban resi- 
dences to the city at the rate of twelve miles an hour, sit 
stoically still while the congested traffic makes the car 
take twenty minutes to pass the most crowded section of 
Washington street, — a walk of barely five minutes.^ 

1 The Boston Subway, opened in 1898, has impaired the truth of this 
sentence. 



12 The Land of Contrasts 

Even in the matter of what Mr. Ambassador Bayard 
has styled " that form of Socialism, Protection," it seems 
to me that we can find traces of this contradictory ten- 
dency. Americans consider their country as empliatically 
the land of protection, and attribute most of their pros- 
perity to their inhospitable customs barriers. This may 
be so ; but where else in the world will you find such a 
volume and expanse of free trade as in these same United 
States ? We find here a huge section of the world's 
surface, 3,000 miles long and 1,500 miles wide, occupied 
by about fifty practically independent States, containing 
seventy millions of inhabitants, producing a very large 
proportion of all the necessities and many of the luxuries 
of life, and all enjoying the freest of free trade with each 
other. Few of these States are as small as Great Britain, 
and many of them are immensely larger. Collectively 
they contain nearly half the railway mileage of the* globe, 
besides an incomparable series of inland waterways. 
Overall these is continually passing an immense amount 
of goods. The San Francisco Neivs Letter^ a well-known 
weekly journal, points out that of the 1,400,000,000 tons 
of goods carried for 100 miles or upwards on the railways 
of the world in 1895, no less than 800,000,000 were car- 
ried in the United States. Even if we add the 140,000,- 
000 carried by sea-going ships, there remains a balance 
of 60,000,000 tons in favor of the United States as 
against the rest of the world. It is, perhaps, impossible 
to ascertain whether or not the actual value of the goods 
carried would be in the same proportion ; but it seems 
probable that the value of the 800,000,000 tons of the 
home trade of America must considerably exceed that of 
the free portion of the trade of the British Empire, i.e.^ 



The Land of Contrasts 13 

practically the whole of its import trade and that portion 
of its export trade carried on with free-trade countries 
or colonies. The internal commerce of the United States 
makes it the most wonderful market on the globe ; and 
Brother Jonathan, the rampant Protectionist, stands con- 
victed as the greatest Cobdenite of them all ! 

We are all, it is said, apt to " slip up " on our strongest 
points. Perhaps this is why one of the leading writers 
of the American democracy is able to assert that " there 
is no country in the world where the separation of the 
classes is so absolute as ours," and to quote a Russian 
revolutionist, who lived in exile all over Europe and 
nowhere found such want of sympathy between the rich 
and poor as in America. If this were true it would cer- 
tainly form a startling contrast to the general kind- 
heartedness of the American. But I fancy it rather 
points to the condition of greater relative equality. Our 
Russian friend was accustomed to the patronising kind- 
ness of the superior to the inferior, of the master to the 
servant. It is easy, on an empyrean rock, to be "kind" 
to the mortals toiling helplessly down below. It costs 
little, to use Mr. Bellamy's parable, for those securely 
seated on the top of the coach to subscribe for salve to 
alleviate the chafed wounds of those who drag it. In 
America there is less need and less use of this patronis- 
ing kindness ; there is less kindness from class to class 
simply because the conscious realisation of " class " is 
non-existent in thousands of cases where it would be to 
the fore in Europe. As for the first statement quoted 
at the head of this paragraph, I find it very hard of belief. 
It is true that there are exclusive circles^ to which, for 
instance, Buffalo Bill would not have the entree, but the 



14 The Land of Contrasts 

principle of exclusion is on the whole analogous to that 
bj which we select our intimate personal friends. No 
man in America, who is personally fitted to adorn it, 
need feel that he is automaticalljj shut out (as he might 
well be in England) from a really congenial social sphere. 
Another of America's strong points is its sense of 
practical comfort and convenience. It is scarcely open 
to denial that the laying of too great stress on material 
comfort is one of the rocks ahead which the American 
vessel will need careful steering to avoid ; and it is cer- 
tain that Americans lead us in countless little points of 
household comfort and lal)Our-saving ingenuity. But 
here, too, the exception that proves the rule is not too 
coy for our discovery. Tlie terrible roads and the atro- 
ciously kept streets are amongst the most vociferous 
instances of this. It is one of the inexplicable mysteries 
of American civilisation that a young municipality, — or 
even, sometimes, an old one, — with a million dollars to 
spend, will choose to spend it in erecting a most un- 
necessarily gorgeous town-hall rather than in making 
the street in front of it passable for the ordinarily shod 
pedestrian. In New Yoi-k itself the hilarious stock- 
broker returning at night to his palace often finds the 
pavement between his house and his carriage more diffi- 
cult to negotiate than even the hole for his latch-key; 
and I have more than once been absolutely compelled to 
make a detour from Broadway in order to find a cross- 
ing where the icy slush would not come over the tops 
of my boots. 1 The American taste for luxury sometimes 
insists on gratification even at tlie expense of the ordi- 

1 It is only fair to say that this was originally written in 1893, and that 
matters have been greatly improved since then. 



The Land of Contrasts 15 

nary decencies of life. It was an American who said, 
" Give me the luxuries of life and I will not ask for the 
necessities ; " and there is more truth in this epigram, 
as characteristic of the American point of view, than its 
author intended or would, perhaps, allow. In private 
life this is seen in the preference shown for diamond 
earrings and Paris toilettes over neat and effective 
household service. The contrast between the slatternly, 
unkempt maid-servant who opens the door to you and 
the general luxury of the house itself is sometimes of 
the most startling, not to say appalling, description. It 
is not a sufficient answer to say that good servants are 
not so easily obtained in America as in England. This 
is true ; but a slight rearrangement of expenditure 
would secure much better service than is now seen. To 
the English eye the cart in this matter often seems put 
before the horse ; and the combination of excellent wait- 
ing with a modest table equipage is frequent enough in 
the United States to prove its perfect feasibility. 

In American hotels we are often overwhelmed with 
''all the discomforts that money can procure," Avhile 
unable to obtain some of those things which we have 
been brought up to believe among the prime necessaries 
of existence. It is significant that in tlie printed direc- 
tions governing the use of the electric bell in one's bed- 
room, I never found an instance in which the harmless 
necessary bath could be ordered with fewer than nine 
pressures of the button, while the fragrant cocktail or 
some other equally fascinating but dangerous luxury 
might often be summoned by three or four. The most 
elaborate dinner, sei'ved in the most gorgeous china, is 
sometimes spoiled by the Draconian regulation that it 



i6 The Land of Contrasts 

must be devoured between the unholy hours of twelve 
and two, or have all its courses brought on the table at 
once. Thougli tlie Americans invent the most delicate 
forms of machinery, their hoop-iron knives, silver plated 
for facility in cleaning, are hardly calculated to tackle 
anything harder than butter, and compel the beef-eater 
to return to the tearing methods of his remotest ances- 
tor. The waiter sometimes rivals the hotel clerk him- 
self in the splendour of his attire, but this does not 
render more appetising the spectacle of his thumb in the 
soup. The furniture of your bedroom would not have 
disgraced the Tuileries in their palmiest days, but, 
alas, you are parboiled by a diabolic chevaux-de-frise of 
steam-pipes which refuse to be turned off, and insist on 
accompanying your troubled slumbers by an intermittent 
series of bubbles, squeaks, and hisses. The mirror oppo- 
site which you brush your hair is enshrined in the heavi- 
est of gilt frames and is large enough for a Brobdignagian, 
but the basin in which you wash your hands is little 
larger than a sugar-bowl; and when you emerge from 
your nine-times-summoned bath you find you have to 
dry your sacred pereon with six little towels, none larger 
than a snuff-taker's handkerchief. There is no carafe 
of water in the room ; and after countless experiments 
you are reduced to the blood-curdling belief that the 
American tourist brushes his teeth with ice-water, the 
musical tinkling of which in the corridoi-s is the most 
characteristic sound of the American caravanserai. 

If there is anything the Americans pride themselves 
on — and justly — it is their handsome treatment of 
woman. You will not meet five Americans without 
hearing ten times that a lone woman can traverse the 



The Land of Contrasts 17 

length and breadth of the United States without fear of 
insult ; every traveller reports that the United States is 
the Paradise of women. Special entrances are reserved 
for them at hotels, so that they need not risk contamina- 
tion with the tobacco-defiled floors of the public office ; 
they are not expected to join the patient file of room- 
seekers before the hotel clerk's desk, but wait comforta- 
bly in the reception-room while an employee secures 
their number and key. There is no recorded instance of 
the justifiable homicide of an American girl in her 
theatre hat. Man meekly submits to be the hewer of 
wood, the drawer of water, and the beast of burden for 
the superior sex. But even this gorgeous medal has 
its reverse side. S Few things provided for a class well 
able to pay for comfort are more uncomfortable and in- 
decent than the arrangements for ladies on board the 
sleeping cars. Their dressing accommodation is of the 
most limited description ; their berths are not segre- 
gated at one end of the car, but are scattered above 
and below those of the male passengers ; it is considered 
tolerable that they should lie with the legs of a 
strange, disrobing man dangling within a foot of their 
noses. 

Another curious contrast to the practical, material, 
matter-of-fact side of the American is his intense interest 
in the supernatural, the spiritualistic, the superstitious. 
Boston, of all places in the world, is, perhaps, the happiest 
hunting ground for the spiritualist medium, the faith 
healer, and the mind curer. You will find there the 
most advanced emancipation from theological supersti- 
tion combined in the most extraordinary way with a 
more than half belief in the incoherences of a spiritual- 



1 8 The Land of Contrasts 

istic stance. The Boston Christian Scientists have just 
erected a handsome stone chnrch, Avith chime of bells, 
organ, and choir of the most approved ecclesiastical cut ; 
and, greatest marvel of all, have actually had to return 
a surplus of $50,000 (J 10,000) that was subscribed for 
its building. There are two pulpits, one occupied by 
a man who expounds the Bible, while in the other a 
woman responds with the grandiloquent platitudes of 
Mrs. Eddy. In other parts of the country this desire to 
pry into the Book of Fate assumes grosser forms. Mr. 
Bryce tells us that Western newspapers devote a special 
column to the advertisements of astrologers and sooth- 
sayers, and assures us that this profession is as much 
recognised in the California of to-day as in the Greece 
of Homer. 

It seems to me that I have met in America the nearest 
approaches to my ideals of a Bayard sans peur et sans 
reproche ; and it is in this same America that I have met 
flagrant examples of the being wittily described as sans 
fere et sans proche — utterly without the responsibility 
of background and entirely unacquainted with the 
obligation of noblesse. The superficial observer in the 
United States might conceivably imagine the character- 
istic national trait to be self-sufficiency or vanity (this 
mistake has, I believe, been made), and his opinion 
might be strengthened should he find, as I did, in an 
arithmetic published at Richmond during the late Civil 
War, such a modest example as the following : " If one 
Confederate soldier can whip seven Yankees, how many 
Confederate soldiere will it take to whip forty-nine 
Yankees ? " America has been likened to a self-made 
man, hugging her conditions because she has made them, 



The Land of Contrasts 19 

and considering them divine becanse they have grown 
np with the conntry. Another observer might qnite as 
easily come to the conclusion that diffidence and self- 
distrust are the true American characteristics. Certainly 
Americans often show a saving consciousness of their 
faults, and lash themselves with biting satire. There are 
even Americans whose very attitude is an apology — 
wliolly unnecessary — for the Great Republic, and who 
seem to despise any native product until it has received 
the hall-mark of London or of Paris. In tlie new world 
that has produced the new book, of the exquisite delicacy 
and insight of which Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells 
may be taken as typical exponents, it seems to me that 
there are more than the usual proportion of critics 
who prefer to it what Colonel Higginson has well called 
" the brutalities of Haggard and the garlic-flavors of 
Kipling." While, perhaps, the characteristic charm of 
the American girl is her thorough-going individuality 
and the undaunted courage of her opinions, which leads 
her to say frankly, if she think so, that Martin Tupper 
is a greater poet than Shakespeare, yet I have, on the 
other hand, met a young American matron who confessed 
to me Avitli bated breath that she and her sister, for the 
first time in their lives, had gone unescorted to a concert 
the night before last, and, mirahlle dictu^ no harm had 
come of it ! It is in America that I have over and over 
again heard language to which the calling a spade a 
spade would seem the most delicate allusiveness ; but it 
is also in America that I have summoned a blush to the 
cheek of conscious sixty-six by an incautious though 
innocent reference to the temperature of my morning 
tub. In that country I have seen the devotion of Sir 



20 The Land of Contrasts 

Walter Raleigh to his (][ueen rivalled again and again by 
the ordinary American man to tlie ordinary American 
woman (if there be an ordinary American Avonian), and 
in the same country I have myself been scoffed at and 
made game of because I opened the window of a railway 
carriage for a girl in whose delicate veins flowed a few 
drops of coloured blood. In Washington I met Miss 
Susan B. Anthony, and realised, to some extent at least, 
all she stands for. In Boston and other places I find there 
is actually an organised opposition on the part of the ladies 
themselves to the extension of the franchise to Avomen. 
I have hailed with delight the democratic spirit displayed 
in the greeting of my friend and myself by the porter of 
a hotel as " You fellows," and then had the cup of pleas- 
ure dashed from my lips by being told by the same porter 
that'nhe other gentlemaji Avould attend to my baggage ! " 
I have been parboiled with salamanders who seemed to 
find no inconvenience in a room-temperature of eighty 
degrees, and have been nigh frozen to death in open-air 
drives in Avhich the same individuals seemed perfectly 
comfortable. Men appear at the theatre in orthodox 
evening dress, while the tall and exasperating hats of the 
ladies who accompany them would seem to indicate a 
theory of street toilette. From New York to Buffalo I 
am whisked through the air at the rate of fifty or sixty 
miles an hour ; in California I travelled on a train on which 
the engineer shot rabbits from the locomotive, and the 
fireman picked them up in time to jump on the baggage- 
car at the rear end of the train. At Santa Barbara I 
visited an old mission church and convent which vied in 
quaint picturesqueness with anything in Europe ; but, 
alas ! the old monk who showed us round, though wear- 



The Land of Contrasts 21 

ing the regulation gown and knotted cord, had replaced 
his sandals by elastic-sided boots and covered his tonsure 
with a common chummy.' 

Few things in the United States are more pleasing 
than the widespread habits of kindness to animals (most 
American whips are, as far as punishment to the horse 
is concerned, a mere farce). Yet no American seems to 
have any scruple about adding an extra hundred weight 
or two to an already villainously overloaded horse-car ; 
and I have seen a score of American ladies sit serenely 
watching the frantic straining of two poor animals to 
get a derailed car on to the track again, when I knew 
that in '' brutal " Old England every one of them would 
have been out on the sidewalk to lighten the load. 

In England that admirable body of men popularly 
known as Quakers are indissolubly associated in the 
public mind with a pristine simplicity of life and con- 
versation. My amazement, therefore, may easily be 
imagined, when T found that an entertainment given by 
a young member of the Society of Friends in one of the 
great cities of the Eastern States turned out to be the 
most elaborate and beautiful private ball I ever attended, 
with about eight hundred guests dressed in tlie height of 
fashion, while the daily papers (if I remember rightly) 
estimated its expense as reaching a total of some thousands 
of pounds. Here the natural expansive liberality of the 
American man proved stronger than the traditional 
limitations of a religious society. But the opposite art 
of cheese-paring is by no means unknown in the United 

^This may be paralleled in Europe: "The Franciscan monks of Bosnfa 
wear long black robes, with rope, black ' bowler hats,' and long and heavy 
military moustachios (by special permission of the Pope)." — Daily Chronicle, 
Oct. 5, 1895. 



22 The Land of Contrasts 

States. Perliiips not even canny Scotland can parallel 
the record of certain districts in New England, which 
actually elected their parish paupere to the State Legis- 
lature to keep them off the rates. Let the opponents 
of paid members of the House of Commons take notice ! 

Amid the little hand of tourists in whose company I 
happened to enter the Yosemite Valley Avas a San Fran- 
cisco youtli with a delightful baritone voice, who enter- 
tained the guests in the hotel parlour at Wawona by a 
good-natured series of songs. No one in the room 
except myself seemed to find it in the least incongruous 
or fuiniy that he sandwiched '' Nearer, my God, to thee " 
between " The man Avho broke the bank at Monte 
Carlo " and " Her golden hair was hanging down her 
back," or that he jumped at once from the pathetic 
solemnity of " I knov.^ that my Redeemer liveth " to the 
jingle of "Little Annie Rooney." The name Wawona 
reminds me how American weather plays its part in tlie 
game of contrasts. When we visited the Grove of Big 
Trees near Wawona on May 21, it was in the midst of a 
driving snow-storm, with the thermometer standing at 
36 degrees Fahrenheit. Next day, as we drove into 
Raymond, less than forty miles to the west, the sun was 
beating down on our backs, and the thermometer marked 
80 degrees in tlie shade. 

There is probal^ly no country in the world where, at 
times, letters of introduction are more fully honoured 
than in the LTnited States. Tlie recipient does not con- 
tent himself with inviting you to call or even to dinner. 
He invites you to make his house your home ; he invites 
all his friends to meet you; he leaves his business to 
show you the lions of the town or to drive you about the 



The Land of Contrasts 23 

country ; lie puts you up at his club ; he sends you off 
provided with letters to ten other men like himself, 
only more so. On the other hand, there is probably no 
country in the world where a letter of introduction from 
a man quite entitled to give it could be wholly ignored 
as it sometimes is in the United States. The writer 
has had experience of both results. No more funda- 
mental contrast can well be imagined than that between 
the noisy, rough, crude, and callous street-life of some 
Western towns and the quiet, reticence, delicac}^ spirit- 
uality, and refinement of many of the adjacent interiors. 

The table manners of the less-educated American 
classes are hardly of the best, but where but in America 
will you find eleven hundred charity-school boys sit down 
daily to dinner, each with his own table na[)kin, as they 
do at Girard College, Philadelphia? And where except 
at that same institute Avill you find a man leaving mill- 
ions for a charity, with the stipulation that no parson of 
any creed shall ever l)e allowed to enter its precincts ? 

In concluding this chapter, let me say that its object, 
as indeed the object of this whole book, will have l)een 
achieved if it convinces a few Britons of the futility of 
generalising on the complex organism of American soci- 
ety from inductions that would not justify an opinion 
about the habits of a piece of protoplasm. ^ 

^In the just-ended war with Spain, ihe United States did not fail to justify 
its character as the Land of Contrasts. From the wealthy and enlightened 
United States we should certainly have expected all that money and science 
could afford in the shape of superior weapons and efficiency of commissariat 
and medical service, while we could have easily pardoned a little unsteadiness 
in civilians suddenly turned into soldiers. As a matter of fact, the poverty- 
stricken Spaniards had better riilcs than the Americans; the Commissariat 
and Medical Departments are allefjed to have broken down in the most dis- 
graceful way ; the citizen-soldiers behaved like veterans. 



Ill 



Lights and Shadows of American 
Society 

BY *' society " I do not meiin that limited body 
wliieli, wlietlier iis the Upper Ten Thousand of 
London or as the Four Hundred of New York, 
usually arrogates the title. Such narrowness 
of detinition seems peculiarly out of place in tlie vigor- 
ous democracy of the West. By society I understand 
the great body of fairly Avell-educated and fairly well- 
mannered people, whose means and inclinations lead 
them to associate with each other on terms of equality 
for the ordinary purposes of good fellowship. Such 
people, not being fenced in by conventional barriers and 
owning no special or obtrusive privileges, represent 
much more fully and naturally the characteristic national 
traits of their country ; and their ways and customs are 
the most fruitful field for a comparative stud}^ of national 
character. The daughters of dukes and princes can 
hardly be taken as typical English girls, since the con- 
ditions of their life are so vastly different from those 
of the huge majority of the species — conditions whicli 
deny a really natural or normal development to all but 
the choicest and strongest souls. So the daughter of a 
New York multimillionaire, who has been l)rought up to 
regard a British duke or an Italian prince as her natural 

partner for life, does not look out on the world through 

24 



American Society 25 

genuinely .Vnieriean spectacles, but is biassed by a point 
of view which may be somewhat paradoxically termed 
the '' cosmopolitan-exclusive." As Mr. Henry James 
puts it : '' After all, what one sees on a Newport piazza is 
not America ; it is the back of Europe." 

There are, however, reasons special to the United 
States why Ave should not regard the "Newport set" 
as typical of American society. Illustrious foreign 
visitors fall not unnaturally into this mistake ; even so 
keen a critic as M. Bourget leans this way, though Mr. 
Bryce gives another proof of his eminent sanity and good 
sense l^y his avoidance of the tempting error. But, as 
\V-dlt Whitman says, " The pulse-beats of the nation are 
never to be found in the sure-to-be- put-forward-on-such- 
occasions citizens." European fasliionable society, how- 
ever unworthy many of its members may be, and however 
relaxed its rules of admission have become, has its roots 
in an honourable past ; its theory is fine ; not all the big 
names of the British aristocracy can be traced back to 
strong ales or weak (tzucy) Waters. Even those who 
desire the abolition of the House of Peers, or look on it, 
with Bagehot, as ''a vapid accumulation of torpid com- 
fort," cannot deny that it is an institution that has grown 
up naturally with the country, and that it is only now 
(if even now) that it is felt with anything like univer- 
sality to be an anomaly. The American society which is 
typified by the four hundred of New York, the society 
which marries its daughters to English peers, is in a very 
different position. It is of mushroom growth even accord- 
ing to American standards ; it has theoretically no right 
to exist ; it is entirely at variance with the spirit of the 
country and contradictory of its political system j it is 



26 The Land of Contrasts 

almost solely conditioned by wealth ^ it is disregarded 
if not despised by nine-tenths of the population ; it does 
not really count. However seriously the little cliques 
of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may take them- 
selves, they are not regarded seriously by the rest of the 
country in any degree comparable to the attitude of the 
British Philistine towards the British Barbarian. With- 
out the appropriate background of king and nobility, the 
whole system is ridiculous ; it has no national basis. 
The source of its honour is ineradicably tainted. It is 
the reductio ad ahsurdum of the idea of aristocratic soci- 
ety. It is divorced from the real body of democracy. It 
sets no^authoritative standard of taste. If anything could 
reconcile the ^British Radical to his House of Lords, 
it would be the rankness of taste, the irresponsible freaks 
of individual caprice, that rule in a country where there 
is no carefully polished noblesse to set the pattern. 
George William Curtis puts the case well : " Fine society 
is no exotic, does not avoid, but all that does not belong 
to it drops away like water from a smooth statue. We 
are still peasants and parvenues, although we call each 
other princes and l)uild palaces. Before we are three 
centuries old Ave are endeavouring to surpass, by imitat- 
ing, the results of all art and civilisation and social genius 
beyond the sea. By elevating the standard of expense 
we hope to secure select society, but have only aggra- 
vated the necessity of a labour integrally fatal to the kind 
of society av3 seek." 

It would, of course, be a serious mistake to assume 

1 Mrs. Burton Harrison reports that a young New York matron said to her, 
" lleally, now that society in New York is fretting so large, one must draw 
the line somcwhei-e; after this I shall visit and invite only those who have 
more than five millions." 



American Society 27 

that, because there are no titles and no theory of caste 
in the United States, there are no social distinctions 
worth tlie trouble of recognition. Besides the crudely 
obvious elevation of wealth and " smartness " already 
referred to, there are inner circles of good birth, of cult- 
ure, and so on, which are none the less practically 
recognised because tliey are theoretically ignored. Of 
such are the old Dutch clans of New York, which still, 
I am informed, regard families like the Vanderbilts as 
upstarts and parvenues. In Chicago there is said to 
l)e an inner circle of forty or fifty families which is 
recognised as the "best society," though by no means 
composed of the richest citizens. In Boston, though 
the Almighty Dollar now plays a mucli more impor- 
tant role than before, it is still a combination of 
culture and ancestry that sets the most liighly prized 
liall-mark on the social items. And indeed the heredity 
of such families as the Quincys, the Lowells, the Win- 
throps, and the Adamses, which have maintained their 
superior position for generations, through sheer force of 
ability and character, without the external buttresses of 
primogeniture and entail, may safely measure itself 
against the stained lineage of many European families 
of high title. The very absence of titular distinction 
often causes the lines to be more clearly drawn ; as Mr. 
Charles Dudley Warner says : " Popular commingling 
in pleasure resorts is safe enough in aristocratic coun- 
tries, but it will not answer in a republic." There is, 
however, no universal theory that holds good from New 
York to California ; and hence the generalising foreigner 
is apt to see nothing but practical as well as theoretical 
equality. 



28 The Land of Contrasts 

In spite of anything in the foregoing that may seem 
incompatible, the fact remains tliat the distinguishing 
feature of American society, as contrasted with the soci- 
eties of Europe, is the greater approach to equality that it 
has made. It is in this sphere, and not in those of industry, 
law, or politics, that the British observer must feel tliat 
the American breathes a distinctly more liberal and dem- 
ocratic air than he. The processes of endosmose and 
exosmose go on under much freer conditions ; the indi- 
vidual particle is much more ready to filtrate up or 
down to its proper level. Mr. W. D. Howells writes 
that " once good society contained only persons of noble 
or gentle birth ; then persons of genteel or sacred call- 
ings were admitted ; now it welcomes to its level every- 
one of agreeable manners or cultivated mind ; " and 
this, which may be true of modern society in general, 
is infinitely more true in America than elsewhere. It 
might almost be asserted that CA^eryone in America ulti- 
mately finds his pro[)er social niche ; that while many 
are excluded from the circles for which they tJiink them- 
selves adapted, practically none are shut off from their 
really harmonious mU'ieu. The process of segregation is 
deprived to a large extent of the disagreeableness con- 
sequent upon a rigid table of precedence. Nothing sur- 
prises an American more in London society than the 
uneasy sense of inferiority that many a distinguished 
man of letters will show in the presence of a noble lord. 
No amount of philosophy enables one to rise entirely 
superior to the trannnels of earty training and hoary 
association. Even when the great novelist feels liim- 
self as at least on a level with his ducal interlocutor, he 
cannot ignore tlie fact that his fellow-guests do not share 



American Society 29 

liis opinion. Now, withont going the lengtli of assert- 
ing that there is absolutely nothing of this kind in the 
intercourse of the American author with the American 
railroad magnate, it may be safely stated that the general 
tone of society in America makes such an attitude rare 
and unlikely. There social equality has become an 
instinct, and the ruling note of good society is of 
pleasant cameraderie, without condescension on the one 
hand or fawning on the other. '' The democratic system 
deprives people of weapons that everyone does not 
equally possess. No one is formidable ; no one is on 
stilts ; no one has great pretensions or any recognised 
right to be arrogant." (Henry James.) The spiiit of 
goodwill, of a desire to make otiiers happy (especially 
wdien it does not incommode you to do so), swings 
through a much larger arc in American society than in 
English. One can be surer of one's self, witliout either 
an overweening self-conceit or the assumption of brassy 
self-assertion. 

The main rock of offence in American society is, per- 
haps, its tendency to attach undue importance to materi- 
alistic effects. Plain livinof with hip"h thinkino- is not so 
mucli of an American formula as one would wish. In 
the smart set of New York, and in other places mutatis 
miitandis^ this shows itself in an appallingly vulgar and 
ostentatious display of mere purchase power. We are 
expected to find something grand in the fact that an 
entertainment costs so much ; there is little recognition 
of the truth that a man who spends |100 where ^10 
would meet all the demands of good taste is not only a 
l)ad economist, but essentially bourgeois and loriie in 
soul. Even roses are vulgarised, if that be possible, by 



30 The Land of Contrasts 

production in the almost obtrusively handsome variety 
known as the '' American Beauty," and h}^ being heaped 
up like hay-stacks in tlie reception rooms. At a recent 
fashionable marriage in New York no fewer than 20,000 
sprays of lily of the valley are reported to liave heen 
used. A short time ago a wedding party travelled from 
C^hicago to Burlington (Iowa) on a specially constructed 
train which cost ^£100,000 to build; the fortunes of 
the heads of the few families represented aggregated 
X 100,000,000. The private drawing-room cars of mill- 
ionaires are too handsome ; they do not indicate so 
much a necessity of taste as a craving to spend. Manj- 
of the best hotels are characterised by a tasteless mag- 
nificence whicli annoys rather than attracts the artistic 
sense. At one hotel I stayed at in a fashionable 
watering-place the cheapest bedroom cost £1 n night; 
but T did not find tliat its costly tapestr}^ hangings, 
huge Japanese vases, and elaborately carved furniture 
lielped me to woo sweet slumber any more successfull}^ 
tlian the simple equipments of an English village inn. 
Indeed, they rather suggested insomnia, just as the 
ominous name of '' Macbeth," affixed to one of the bed- 
I'ooms in the Shakespeare Hotel at Stratford-on-Avon, 
innnediately suggested the line " Macbeth dotli murder 
sleep." 

This materialistic tendency, liowever, which its de- 
fenders call a higher standard of comfort, is not confined 
to the circles of the millionaires ; it crops out more or 
less at all the different levels. Americans seem a liffle 
more dependent on bodily comforts tlian Englishmen, a 
little more apt to coddle themselves, a little less hardy. 
They are moi-e susceptible to variations of temperature. 



American Society 31 

and hence the prevalent over-heating of their houses, 
hotels, and railway-cars. A very slight shower will 
send an American into his overshoes.^ There is more 
of a self-conscious effort in the encouragement of manly 
sports. Americans seldom walk when they can ride, 
'i'he girls are apt to be annoyed if a pleasure-party be 
not carried out so as to provide in tlie fullest way for 
tlieir personal comfort. 

This last sentence suggests a social practice of the 
United States which, perliaps, may come under the topic 
we are at present discussing. I mean the custom by 
which girls allow their young men friends to incur 
expense in their behalf. I am aware that this custom is 
on the wane in the older cities, that the most refined 
girls in all parts of the Union dislike it, that it is "bad 
form" in mau}^ circles. In tlie bowling-club to wliich I 
liad the pleasure to l)elong the ladies paid their subscrip- 
tions " like a man ; " when I drove out on sleigh-parties 
the girls insisted on paying their share of the expense. 
The fact, however, remains that, speaking generally 
and taking class for class, the American girl allows her 
admirers to spend their money on her much more freely 
than the English girl. A man is considered mean if he 
does not pay the car-fare of his girl companion ; a girl 
will allow a man who is merely a " friend " to take lier to 
the theatre, fetching her and taking her home in a car- 
riage hired at exorbitant rates. The Illustrated Amer- 
ican (Jan. 19, 1895) Avrites : 

The advanced ideas prevalent in this country regarding 
the relations of the opposite sexes make it not only proper, 

1 I have seen a brakeraaii on a passenger train wear overshoes on a showery 
day, though his duties hardly ever eonipellcd him to leave the covered cars. 



32 The Land of Contrasts 

but necessary, that a young man with serious intentions 
shall take his sweetheart out, give her presents, send her 
flowers, go driving with her, and in numberless little wa3^s 
incur expense. This is all very delightful for her, but to 
him it means ruin. And at the end he may find that slie 
was only flirting with him. 

In fact, whenever a young man and a young woman 
are associated in any enterprise,*it is quite usual for the 
young man to pay for both. On the wliole, this custom 
seems an undesirable one. It is so much a matter of 
habit that the American girl usually plays her part in 
the matter with absolute innocence and unconsciousness ; 
she feels no more obligation than an English girl Avould 
for the opening of a door. The young man also takes it 
as a matter of course, and does not in the least presume 
on his services. But still, I think, it has a slight ten- 
dency to rub the bloom off what ought to be the most 
delicate and ethereal form of social intercourse. It 
favours the well-to-do youth by an additional handicap. 
It throws another obstacle in the track of poverty and 
thrift. It is contrary to the spirit of democratic equal- 
ity ; the woman who accepts such attentions is tacitly 
allowing that she is not on the same footing as man. 
On reflection it must grate a little on tlie finest feel- 
ings. There seems to me little doubt that it will gradu- 
ally die out in circles to which it would be stnmge in 
Europe. 

On the whole, however, even with such drawbacks as 
the above, the social relationsliip of the sexes in the 
United States is one of the many points in whicli the 
new surpasses the old. Tlie American girl is tlu'own 



American Society t,^ 

into such free and ample relations with the American 
boy from her earliest youth up that she is very apt to 
look upon him simply as a girl of a stronger growth. 
Some such word as the German Gesehwister is needed to 
embrace the '' young creatures " who, in petticoats or 
trousers, form the genuine democracy of American j^outh. 
Up to the doors of college, and often even beyond tliem, 
the boy and girl have l)een " co-educated ; " at the high 
school the boy has probably had a woman for his teacher, 
at least in some branches, up to his sixteenth or seven- 
teenth year. The liours of recreation are often spent 
in pastimes in which girls may share. In some of the 
most characteristic of American amusements, such as 
the " coasting " of winter, girls take a prominent place. 
There is no effort on the part of elders to play the spy 
on the meetings of Ix^y or girl, or to place obstacles in 
their way. They are not thought of as opposite sexes ; 
it is " just all the young people together." The result is 
a spirit of absolute good comradeship. There is little 
atmosphere of the unknown or the mysterious about the 
opposite sex. The love that leads to marriage is thus 
apt to be the product of a wider experience, and to be 
based on a more intimate knowledge. The sentimental 
may cry fie on so clear-sighted a Cupid, but the sensible 
cannot but rejoice over anything that tends to the un- 
doing of the phrase " lottery of marriage." 

That the ideal attitude towards and in marriaofe has 
been attained in average American society I ^diould be 
the last to assert. The way in which American wives 
leave their husbands toiling in the sweltering city while 
they themselves fleet the time in Europe would alone 
give me pause. But T am here concerned witli tlie rela- 



34 The Land of Contrasts 

tive and not the absokite ; and my contention is that 
the average marriage in America is apt to he made 
under conditions which, compared with those of other 
nations, increase the chances of happiness. A great 
deal has been said and written abont the inconsistency 
of the marriage haws of the different States, and mncli 
clieap wit has been fired off at the fatal facility of 
divorce in the United States ; but I could not ascertain 
from my own observation that these defects touched any 
very great proportion of the population, or played any 
larger part in American society, as I have defined it, than 
the di^'erences between the marriage laws of England 
and Scotland do in our own island. M. Bonrget, quite 
arbitrarily and (I think) with a trace of the proverbial 
Gallic way of looking at the relations of the sexes, has 
attributed the admitted moral purity of the atmosphere 
of American society to the coldness of the American 
temperament and the sera juvenum Venus. It seems to 
me, however, that there is no call to disparage American 
virtue ])y the suggestion of a constitutional want of lia- 
bility to temptation, and that Mark Twain, in his some- 
wliat irreverent rejoinder, is much nearer the mark when 
he attrilmtes the prevalent sanctity of the marriage tie 
to tlie fact that tlie husbands and wives have generally 
married each other for love. This is undoubtedly the 
true note of America in this particular, thougli it may 
not be unreservedly characteristic of the smart set of 
New York. If the sacred flame of Cupid could be 
exposed to the alembic of statistics, I should be sur- 
prised to hear that the love matches of the United 
States did not reach a liigher percentage than those of 
any other nation. One certainly meets more liusbands 



American Society 35 

and wives of mature age who seem thoroughly to enjoy 
each other's society. 

There is a certain ••' snap " to American society tliat is 
not due merely to a sense of novelty, and does not 
wholly wear off through familiarity. The sense of 
enjoyment is more obvious and more evenly distributed ; 
there is a general willingness to be amused, a general 
absence of the hltue. Even Matthew Arnold could not 
help noticing the '' buoyancy, enjoyment, and freedom 
from restraint which are everywhere in America," and 
which he accounted for by the absence of the aristocratic 
incubus. The nervous fluid so characteristic of America 
in general flows briskly in the veins of its social oigan- 
ism ; the feeling is abroad that what is worth doing is 
worth doing well. There is a more general ability than 
we possess to talk brightly on the topics of the moment ; 
there is less lingering over one subject ; there is a con- 
stant savour of the humorous view of life. The more 
eve]i distribution of comfort in the United States 
(becoming, alas ! daily less characteristic) adds largely 
to the pleasantness of society by minimising the semi- 
conscious feeling of remorse in playing while the ''other 
half " starves. The inherent inal)ility of the American 
to understand that there is au}^ '' higher " social order 
than his own minimises the feeling of qwyj of those 
" above " him. " How dreadful," says the Englishman 
to the American girl, " to be governed by men to whom 
you would not speak I " " Yes," is the rejoinder, '-'• and 
how delightful to be governed by men who won't 
speak to you ! " From this latter form of delight Ameri- 
can society is free. Henry James strikes a true note 
when he makes Miranda Hope (in " A Bundle of Let- 



36 The Land of Contrasts 

ters ") describe the hishionable girl she met at a Paris 
pension as '' Uke the peo[)le they call ' haughty ' in 
hooks," and then go on to sa}", '' I have never seen 
anyone like that before — anyone that wanted to make 
a difference." And her feeling of impersonal interest 
in the phenomenon is equally characteristic. " She 
seemed to me so like a proud young lady in a novel. I 
kept saying to myself all day, •• haughty, haughty,' and I 
Avished she would keep on so." Too much stress can- 
not easily be laid on this feeling of equality in the air 
as a potent enhancer of the pleasure of society. To feel 
yourself patronised — even, perhaps especially, when 
you know yourself to be in all respects the superior of 
the patroniser — may tickle your sense of humour for a 
while, but in the long run it is distinctly dispiriting. 
The philosopher, no doubt, is or should be able to dis- 
regard the petty annoyances arising from an ever-present 
consciousness of social limitation, but society is not 
entirely composed of philosophers, even in America ; 
and the sense of freedom and space is unqualifiedly wel- 
come to its members. It is not easy for a European to 
the manner born to realise the sort of extravagant, 
nightmare effect that many of our social customs have 
in the eyes of our untutored American cousins. The 
inherent absurdities that are second nature to us exhale 
for them the full flavour of their grotesqueness. The 
idea of an insignificant bo}^ peer taking precedence of 
Mr. John Morley ! The idea of having to appear before 
royalty in a state of partial nudity on a cold winter day ! 
The necessity of backing out of the royal presence ! 
The idea of a freeborn Briton having to get out of an 
engagement long previously formed on the score that 



American Society 37 

'^ he has been eommanded to dine with H.R.H." The 
horrible capiUary phister necessary before a man can 
serve decently as an opener of carriage-doors ! The 
horsehair envelopes withont which onr legal brains can- 
not work ! The nnwritten law by which a man has to 
nnrse his hat and stick throughout a call unless his 
hostess specially asks him to lay them aside ! 

Mr. Bryce commits himself to tlie assertion that 
'' Scotchmen and Irishmen are more unlike Englishmen, 
tlie native of Normandy more unlike the native of Prov- 
ence, the Pomeranian more unlike the Wurtemberger, 
tlie Piedmontese more unlike the Neapolitan, the Basque 
more unlike the Andalusian, than the American from 
any part of the country is to the American from any 
other." Max OTlell, on the other liand, writes : 
'' Lliabitant du Nord-est des Etats Unis, le Yankee, dif- 
fere autant de I'Americain de I'Ouest et du Midi que 
I'Anglais differe de FAllemand ou de I'Espagnol." On 
this point I find myself far more in accord with the 
French than with the British observer, though, perhaps, 
M. Blouet rather overstates his case. Wider differences 
among civilised men can hardl}^ be imagined than those 
which subsist between the Creole of New Orleans and 
the Yankee of Maine, the Kentucky farmer and the 
Michigan lumberer. It is, however, true that there is a 
distinct tendency for the stamp of the Eastern States to 
be applied to the inhabitants of the cities, at least, of the 
West. The founders of these cities are so largely men 
of Eastern birth, the means of their expansion are so 
largely advanced by Eastern capitalists, that this ten- 
dency is easily explicable. [So far as my observation 
went it was to Boston rather than to New York or Phila- 



38 The Land of Contrasts 

delpliia that the educated chisses of the Western cities 
looked as the cjaiosure of their eyes. Boston seemed 
to stand for something less material than these other 
cities, and the subtler nature of its influence seemed to 
magnify its pervasive force.] None the less do the 
people of the United States, compared with those of any 
one European country, seem to me to have their due 
share of variety and even of pictui'esqneness. This 
latter quality is indeed denied to the United States not 
only by European visitors, but also by many Americans. 
This denial, however, rests on a limited and traditional 
use of the word picturesque. America has not the 
European picturesqueness of costume, of relics of the 
past, of the constant presence of the potential foeman at 
the gate. But apart altogether from the almost theat- 
rical romance of frontier life and the now obsolescent 
conflict with the aborigines, is there not some element 
of the picturesque in the processes of readjustment by 
which the emigrants of European stock have adapted 
themselves and are adapting themselves to the con- 
ditions of the New World ? In some Avays tlie nineteenth 
century is the most romantic of all ; and the United 
States embody and express it as no other country. Is 
there not a picturesque side to the triumph of civilisa- 
tion over barbarism ? Is there nothing of the picturesque 
in the long thin lines of gleaming steel, thrown across 
the countless miles of desert sand and alkali plain, and 
in the nighty mass of metal with its glare of Cyclopean 
eye and its banner of fire-illumined smoke, that bears the 
conquerors of stubborn nature from side to side of the 
great continent ? Is there not an element of the pict- 
uresque in the struggles of the Western farmer? Can 



American Society 39 

anything be finer in its way than a night view of Pitts- 
burg — - that " Hell with its lid off," where the cold gleam 
of electricity vies with the lurid glare of the furnaces 
and smelting Avorks ? I say nothing of the Californian 
Missions ; of the sallow Creoles of New Orleans with their 
gorgeous processions of Mardi-Gras ; or of the almost 
equally fantastic fete of the Veiled Prophet of St. Louis ; 
or of the lumberers of Michigan ; or of the Mexicans of 
Arizona ; or of the German beer-gardens of Chicago ; or 
of the swinging lanterns and banners of Chinatown in 
San Francisco and Mott street in New York ; or of the 
Italians of Mulberry Bend in the latter city ; or of the 
alternating stretches on a long railway journey of forest 
and prairie, yellow corn-fields and sandy desert ; or of 
many other classes and conditions which are by no means 
void of material for the artist in pen or Ijrush. All these 
lend hues that are anything ])ut prosaic to my kaleido- 
scopic recollections of the United States ; but more than 
all these, the characteristically picturesque feature of 
American life, stands out the omnipresent negro. It 
was a thrill to have one's boots blackened by a coloured 
" professor " in an alley-way of Boston, and to hear his 
richly intoned " as shoh's you're bawn." It was a delight 
to see the negro couples in the Public Garden, conduct- 
ing themselves and their courting, as Mr. Howells has 
well remarked, with infinitely more restraint and refine- 
ment than their Milesian compeers, or to see them pass- 
ing out of the Charles-street Church in all the Sunday 
bravery of broadcloth coats, shiny hats, wonderfully 
laundered skirts of snowy whiteness, and bodices of all 
the hues of the rainbow. And all through the Union their 
glossy black faces and gleaming white teeth shed a kind 



40 The Land of Contrasts 

of dusky raditiiice over the traveller's path. Who Ijiit 
can recall with gratitude the expansive geniality and 
reassuring smile of the white-coated negro waiter, as com- 
pared with the supercilious indifference, if not positive 
rudeness, of his pale colleague ? And what Avill ever 
efface the mental kodak of George (not Sambo any more) 
shuffling rapidly into the dining-room, with his huge flat 
palm inverted high over his head and bearing a colossal 
tray heaped up with good things for the guest under his 
charge ? And shall I ever forget the grotesque gravity 
of the negro brakeman in Louisiana, with his tall silk 
hat ? or the pair of gloves pathetically shared between 
two neatly dressed negro youtlis in a railway carriage in 
Georgia? or the pickaninnies slumbering sweetly in old 
packing-cases in a hut at Jacksonville, wdiile their fatlier 
thrummed the soft guitar with friendly grin? It has 
always seemed to me a reproach to American artists that 
they fill the air with sighs over the absence of the pict- 
uresque in the United States, while almost totally over- 
looking the fine flesh-tones and gay dressing of the 
coloured brother at their elbow. 

The most conventional society of America is apt to 
be more or less shrouded by the pall of monotony that 
attends convention elsewhere, but typical American 
society — the societ}^ of the great mass of Americans — 
shows distinctly more variety than that of England. In 
social meetings, as in Inisiness, the American is ever on 
the alert for some new thing ; and the brain of every 
pretty girl is cudgelled in order to provide some novelty 
for her next party. Hence the progressive euchre, the 
" library " parties, the " shadow '' dances, the conversa- 
tion parties, and the long series of ingenious games, the 



American Society 41 

adoption of wliicli, for some of us iit least, has clone 
niucli to lighten the deadly dulness of English " small 
and earlies." Even the sacro-sanctity of whist has not 
been respected, and the astonished shade of Ho3de has 
to look on at his favourite game m the form of " drive " 
and " duplicate." The way in which whist has been 
taken up in the United States is a good example of the 
national unwillingness to remain in the ruts of one's 
ancestors. Possibly the best club-players of England 
are at least as good as the best Americans, but the gen- 
eral average of play and the general interest in tlie 
game are distinctly higher in the United States. Every 
English whist-plaj^er with any pretension to science 
knows what he has to expect when he finds an unknown 
lady as his partner, especially if she is below thirty ; but 
in America he will often find himself " put to his 
trumps ■' by a bright girl in her teens. The girls in 
Boston and other large cities have organised afternoon 
whist-clubs, at which all the "- rigour of the game " is 
observed. Many of them take regular lessons from 
whist experts ; and among the latter themselves are 
not a few ladies, who find the teaching of their favour- 
ite game a more lucrative employment than governess- 
ing or journalism. Even so small a matter as the eating 
of ice-cream may illustrate the progressive nature of 
American society. Elderly Americans still remember 
the time when it was usual to eat this refreshing deli- 
cacy out of economical wine-glasses such as we have 
still to be content with in England. But now-a-days 
no American expects or receives less than a heaping 
saucer of ice-cream at a time. 

Americans are born dancers ; they have far more 



42 The Land of Contrasts 

quicksilver in their feet tluin their English cousins. 
Perhaps the very best waltzers I have ever danced with 
were English girls, avIio understood the poetry of the 
art and knew how to reflect not merely the time of the 
music, but its nuances of rhythm and tone. But dancers 
such as these are like fairies' visits, that come but once 
or twice in a lifetime ; and a lai'ge proportion of English 
girls dance very badly. In America one seldom or never 
finds a girl who cannot dance fairly, and most of them 
can claim much warmer adverbs than that. The Amer- 
ican invention of '^ reversing " is admirable in its unex- 
aggerated form, but requires both study and practice ; 
and the reason that it was voted " bad form " in England 
was simply that the indolence of the gilded youth pre- 
vented him ever taking the trouble to master it. Our 
genial satirist Punch hit the nail on the head : '^ Shall 
we — eh — reverse, Miss Lilian? " '' Reverse, indeed ; it\s 
as much as you can do to keep on your legs as it is." 
One custom at American dances struck me as sin- 
gularly stupid and un-American in its inelasticity. I 
know not how widespread it is, or how fashionable, but 
it reigned in circles which seemed to my unsophisticated 
eyes quite comme il faut. The custom is that by which 
a man having once asked a lady to dance becomes 
responsible for her until someone else offers himself as 
her partner. It probably arose from the chivalrous 
desire not to leave any girl partnerless, but in practice it 
works out quite the other way. When a man realises 
that he mai/ have to retain the same partner for several 
dances, or even for the greater part of the evening, he 
will, unless he is a Bayard absolutely sans peur et sans 
reprf^^h-p., naturally think twice of engaging a lady from 



American Society 43 

whom his release is problematicaL Hence the tendency 
is to increase the trinmphs of the belle, and decrease the 
chances of the less popular maiden. It is also extremely 
uncomfortable for a girl to feel that a man has (to use 
the ugly slang of the occasion) " got stuck " with her ; 
and it takes more adroitness and self-possession than 
any young girl can be expected to possess to extricate her- 
self neatly from the awkward position. Another funny 
custom at subscription balls of a very respectable char- 
acter is that many of the matrons wear their bonnets 
throughout the evening. But this, perhaps, is not 
stranger than the fact that ladies wear hats in the theatre, 
Avhile the men who accompany them are in evening dress 
— a curious habit which to the uninitiated observer 
would suggest that the nymphs belonged to a less 
fashionable stratum than their attendant swains. A 
parallel instance is that of afternoon receptions, where 
the hostess and her myrmidons appear in ball costume, 
while the visitors are naturally in the toilette of the 
street. The contrast thus evolved of low necks and 
heavy furs is often very comical. The British conven- 
tion by which the hostess always dresses as plainly as 
possible so as to avoid the chance of eclipsing any of her 
guests, and so cliooses t^, hriller par sa simpUcite, is in 
other cases also more honoured in the breach than in the 
observance in America. 

A very characteristic little piece of the social democ- 
racy of America is seen at its best in Chicago, though 
not unknown in other large cities. On the evening of 
a hot summer day cushions and rugs are spread on the 
front steps of the houses, and the occupants take pos- 
session of these, the men to enjoy their after-dinner 



44 



The Land of Contrasts 



cigars, the women to talk and scan the passers-by. The 
general effect is very genial and picturesque, and de- 
cidedly suggestive of democratic sociability. The same 
American indifference to the exaggerated British love 
of privacy which leads John Bull to enclose his fifty- 
foot-square garden by a ten-foot wall is shown in the 
Avay in which the gardens of city houses are left un- 
fenced. Nothing can be more attractive in its way than 
such a street as Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, where tlie 
pretty villas stand in unenclosed gardens, and the ver- 
dant lawns melt imperceptibly into each other Avithout 
advertisement of where one leaves off and the other 
begins, while the fronts towards the street are equally 
exposed. The general effect is that of a large and 
beautiful park dotted with houses. The American is 
essentially gregarious in his instinct, and the possession 
of a vast feudal domain, witli a high wall round it, can 
never make up to him for the excitement of near neigli- 
bours. It may seriously be doubted whetlier tlie Ameri- 
can millionaire who buys a lordly demesne in England 
is not doing violence to his natural and national tastes 
every day that he inhabits it. 



IV 
An Appreciation of the American Woman 

COMPARED to the appearance of the American 
girl in books written abont the United States, 
that of Charles I.'s head in Mr. Dick's niemo- 
iTdl might perhaps be almost called casual. 
All down the literary ladder, from the weighty tomes of a 
Professor Bryce to the witty persiflage of a Max O'Rell, 
we find a considerable part of ever}^ rung occupied by 
tlie skirts appropriated to the gentler sex ; and — what 
is, perhaps, stranger still — she holds her own even in 
])ooks written by women. It need not be asserted that 
all the references to her are equally agreeable. That 
amial)le critic. Sir Lepel Grifhn, alludes to her only to 
assure us that " he had never met anyone who had lived 
long- or travelled much in America who did not hold 
that female beauty in the States is extremely rare, 
wliile the average of ordinary good looks is unusually 
low," and even visitors of an infinitely more subtle and 
discriminating type, such as M. Bourget, mingle not a 
little vinegar with their syrup of appreciation. But the 
fact remains that almost every book on the United States 
contains a chapter devoted explicitly to the female 
citizen ; and the inevitableness of the record must have 
some solid ground of reason behind or below it. It indi- 
cates a vein of unusual significance, or at the very least 
of unusual conspicuousness, in the plienomenon tlius 

45 



46 The Land of Contrasts 

treated of. Observers have usually found it possible to 
Avrite books on the social and economical traits of other 
countries without a parade of petticoats in the head- 
lines. This is not to say that one can ignore one-half of 
society in writing of it ; but if you search the table of 
contents of such books as Mr. Philip Hamerton's charm- 
ing '^ French and English," or Mr. T. H. S. Escott's 
"England: Its People, Polity, and Pursuits," joii will 
not find the words '' woman " or '' girl," or any equiva- 
lent for them. But the writer on the United States seems 
irresistibly compelled to give woman all that coordinate 
importance which is implied by the prominence of capi- 
tal letters and separate chapters. 

This predominance of woman in books on America is 
not by any means a phase of the " Avoman question," 
technically so called. It has no direct reference to the 
woman as voter, as doctor, as lawyer, as the competitor 
of man ; the subject of interest is woman as woman, the 
Ding a?i sick of German philosophical slang. No doubt 
the writer may have occasion to allude to Dr. Mary 
Walker, to the female mayors of Wyoming, to the presi- 
dential ambitions of INIrs. Belva Lockwood; but these 
are mere adjuncts, not explanations, of tlie question under 
consideration. The European visitor to the United States 
has to write about American women because they bulk so 
largely in his view, because they seem essentially so prom- 
inent a feature of American life, because their relative im- 
portance and interest impress him as greater than those of 
women in the lands of the Old World, because they seem 
to him to embody in so eminent a measure that intangible 
quality of Americanism, the existence, or indeed the pos- 
sibility, of which is so hotly denied by some Americans. 



An Appreciation of the American Woman 47 

Indeed, those who look upon the prominent role of 
the American woman merely as one phase of the " new 
woman" question — merely as the inevitahle conspicu- 
ousness of woman intruding on what has hitlierto been 
exclusively the sphere of man — are many degrees beside 
the point. The American note is as obvious in the girl 
who has never taken the slightest interest in politics, the 
professions, or even the bicycle, as in Dr. Mary Walker 
or Mrs. Lockwood. The prevalent English idea of the 
actual interference of the American woman in public 
life is largely exaggerated. There are, for instance, in 
Massachusetts 625,000 women entitled to vote for mem- 
bers of the school committees ; and tlie largest actual 
vote recorded is 20,14(3. Of 175,000 women of voting 
aofe in Connecticut the numbers who used their vote in 
the last three years were 3,806, 3,241, and 1,906. These, 
if any, are typical American States ; and there is not the 
shadow of a doubt that the 600,000 women who stayed 
at home are quite as " American " as the 20,000 who 
went to the poll. The sphere of the American woman's 
influence and the reason of her importance lie behind 
politics and publicity. 

It seems a reasonable assumption that the formation 
of the American girl is due to the same large elemental 
causes that account for American phenomena generally ; 
and her relative strikingness may be explained by the 
reflection that there was more room for these great forces 
to work in the case of woman than in the case of man. 
The Englishman, for instance, through his contact with 
public life and affairs, through his wider experience; 
through his rubbing shoulders with more varied types, 
had already been prepared for the working of American 



48 The Land of Contrasts 

conditions in a way that his more sheltered Avomankind 
had not heen. In the hleaching of the bLack and the 
grey, the change will he the more striking in the former ; 
the recovery of health will he conspicuons in proportion 
to the gravity of the disease. America lias meant oppor- 
tunity for women even more in some ways than for 
men. The gap l)etween them has been lessened in pro- 
portion as the gap between the American and the 
European has widened. The average American woman 
is distinctly more different from her average English 
sister than is tlie case with their respective brothers. 
Tlie training of the English girl starts from tlie very 
beginning on a different Imsis from that of the boy ; 
she is taught to restrain her impulses, while his are 
allowed much freer scope ; the sister is expected to 
defer to the brother from the time she can walk or 
talk. In America tliis difference of training is con- 
stantly tending to the vanishing point. The American 
woman has never learned to play second fiddle. Tlie 
American girl, as Mr. Henry James says, is rarely nega- 
tive ; slie is either (and usually) a most charming suc- 
cess or (and exceptionally) a most disastrous failure. 
The pathetic army of ineffective spinsters clinging 
apologetically to the skirts of gentility is conspicuous 
by its absence in America. The conditions of life there 
encourage a girl to undertake what she can do bast, with 
a comparatively healthy disregard of its fancied "respec- 
tability." Her consciousness of efficiency reacts in a 
thousand ways ; her feet are planted on so solid a 
foundation that she inevitably seems an important con- 
structive part of society. The contrast between the 
American woman and the English woman in this respect 



An Appreciation of the American Woman 49 

may be illustrated by the two Caryatides in the Braccio 
Nuovo at the Vatican. The first of these, a copy of one 
of the figures of the Erechtheuni, seems to bear the 
superincumbent architrave easily and securely, with her 
feet planted squarely and the main lines running verti- 
cally. In the other, of a later period, the fact tliat tlie 
feet are placed close together gives an air of insecurity 
to the attitude, an effect heightened by the prevalence 
of curved lines in the folds of the drapery. 

The American woman, too, has had more time than 
the American man to cultivate the more amiable — if 
you will, the more showy — qualities of American civil- 
isation. The leisured class of England consists of ])otli 
sexes, that of America practically of one only. Tlie 
problem of the American man so far has mainly been to 
subdue a new continent to human uses, while the woman 
has been sacrificing on the altar of the Graces. Hence 
the wider culture and the more liberal views are often 
found in the sex from which the European does not 
expect them ; hence the woman of New York and other 
American cities is often conspicuously superior to her 
husband in looks, manners, and general intelligence. 
This has been denied by champions of the American 
man; but the observation of the writer, whatever it 
may be worth, would deny the denial. 

The way in which an expression such as " Ladies' 
Cabin" is understood in the United States has always 
seemed to me very typical of the position of the gentler 
sex in that country. In England, when we see an in- 
scription of that kind, we assume tliat the enclosure 
referred to is for ladies only. In America, unless the 
" only " is em[)]iasized, the '^ Ladies' Drawing Room " 



50 



The Land of Contrasts 



or the " Ladies' Waiting Room " extends its hospitahty 
to all those of the male sex who are ready to hehave as 
gentlemen and temporarily forego the delights of to- 
bacco. Thus half of the male passengers of the United 
States journey, as it were, under the regis of woman, 
and think it no shame to be enclosed in a box labelled 
with her name. 

Put roughly, what chiefly strikes the stranger in the 
American woman is her candour, her frankness, her 
hail-fellow-well-met-edness, her apparent absence of con- 
sciousness of self or of sex, her spontaneity, her vivacity, 
her fearlessness. If the observer himself is not of a 
specially refined or delicate type, he is apt at first to 
misunderstand the cameraderie of an American girl, to 
see in it suggestions of a possible coarseness of fibre. 
If a vain man, he may take it as a tribute to his per- 
sonal charms, or at least to the superior claims of a 
representative of old-world civilisation. But even to 
the obtuse stranger of this character it will ultimately 
become obvious — as to the more refined observer ab 
initio — that he can no more (if as mi>ch) dare to take 
a liberty with the American girl than with his own 
countrywoman. The plum may appear to l)e more 
easily handled, but its bloom will be found to be as 
intact and as ethereal as in the jealously guarded hot- 
house fruit of Europe. He will find that her frank and 
charming companionability is as far removed from mas- 
culinity as from coarseness ; that the points in which 
she differs from the European lady do not bring her 
nearer either to a man on the one hand, or to a common 
woman on the other. He will find that he has to re- 
adjust his standards, to see that divergence from the 



An Appreciation oi the American Woman 51 

best type of womaii hitherto known to him does not 
necessarily mean deterioration ; if he is of an open and 
susceptible mind, he may even come to the conclusion 
that lie prefers tlie transatlantic type ! 

Unless his lines in England have lain in very pleasant 
places, the intelligent Englishman in enjoying his first 
experience of transatlantic society will assuredly be 
struck by the sprightliness, the variety, the fearless in- 
dividuality of the American girl, by her power of rep- 
artee, by the quaint appositeness of her expressions, by 
the variety of her interests, l)y the absence of undue 
deference to his masculine dignity. If in his newly 
landed innocence he ventures to compliment the girl he 
talks with on the purity of her English, and assumes 
that she differs in that respect from her companions, she 
Avill patriotically repel the suggested accusation of her 
countrywomen by assuring him, witliout the ghost of a 
smile, '' that she has had special advantages, inasnuich 
as an English missionary had been stationed near her 
tril)e." If she prefers Martin Tupper to Shakespeare, 
or Strauss to Beethoven, she will say so without a 
tremor. Why should she hypocritically subordinate her 
personal instincts to a general tlieory of taste ? Her 
independence is visible in her very dress ; she wears 
what she thinks suits her (and her taste is seldom at 
fault), not merely what happens to be the fashionable 
freak of the moment. What Englishman does not 
shudder when he I'emembers how each of his woman- 
kind — the comely and the homely, the short and 
the long, the stout and the lean — at once assumed the 
latest form of hat, apparently utterly oblivious to the 
question of whether it suited her special style of beauty 



52 The Land of Contrasts 

or not ? Now, an American girl is not Ijnilt that way. 
She wishes to be in the fashion jnst as much as she can ; 
but if a special item of fashion does not set her off to 
advantage, she gracefully and courageously resigns it 
to those who can wear it with profit. But honour where 
honour is due ! The English girl generally shows more 
sense of fitness in the dress for walking and travelling ; 
she, consciously or unconsciously, realises that adapt- 
ability for its practical purpose is essential in such a 
case. 

The American girl, as above said, strikes one as indi- 
vidual, as varied. In England when we meet a girl in 
a ball-room Ave can generally — not always — '' place " 
her after a few minutes' talk ; she belongs to a set of 
which you remember to have already met a volume or 
two. In some continental countries the patterns in 
common use seem reduced to three or four. In the 
United States every new girl is a new sensation. 
Society consists of a series of surprises. Expectation 
is continually piqued. A and B and C do not help you 
to induce D ; when you reach Z you may imagine you 
find a slight trace of reincarnation. Not that the sur- 
prises are invariably pleasant. The very force and self- 
confidence of the American girl doubly and trebly under- 
line the undesirable. Vulgarity that would be stolid 
and stodgy in Middlesex becomes blatant and aggres- 
sive in New York. 

The American girl is not hampered by the feeling of 
class distinction, which has for her neither religious nor 
historical sanction. The English girl is first the squire's 
daughter, second a good church woman, third an Eng- 
lish subject, and fourthly a woman. Even the best of 



An Appreciation of the American Woman 53 

them cannot rise wholly superior to the all-pervading, 
and, in its essence, vulgarising, superstition that some 
of her fellow-creatures are not fit to come between 
the wind and her nobility. Those who reject the theory 
do so by a self-conscious effort Avhich in itself is crude 
and a strain. The American girl is, however, born into 
an atmosphere of unconsciousness of all this, and, unless 
she belongs to a very narrow coterie, does not reach this 
point of view either as believer or antagonist. This 
endues her, at her best, with a sweet and subtle fra- 
grance of humanity that is, perhaps, unique. Free from 
any sense of inherited or conventional superiority or 
inferiority, as devoid of the brutality of condescension 
as of the meanness of toadyism, she combines in a 
strangely attractive way the charm of eternal womanli- 
ness with the latest aroma of a progressive century. 
It is, doubtless, this quality that M. .Bourget has in 
view when he speaks of the incomparable delicacy of 
the American girl, or M. Paul Blouet when he asserts 
that " you find in the American woman a quality which, 
I fear, is beginning to disappear in Paris and is almost 
unknown in London — a kind of spiritualised politeness, 
a tender solicitude for other people, combined with 
strong individuality." 

There is one type of girl, with whom even the most 
modest and most moderately eligible of bachelors must be 
familiar in England, who is seldom in evidence in the 
United States — she whom the American aborigines 
might call the '' Girl-Anxious-to-be-Married." What 
right-minded man in any circle of British society has 
not shuddered at the open pursuit of young Croesus ? 
Have not our novelists and satirists reaped the most 



54 



The Land of Contrasts 



ample harvest from the pitiahle spectacle and all its 
results ? A large part of the advantage that American 
society has over English rests in the comparative absence 
of this phenomenon. Man there does not and cannot 
bear himself as the cynosure of the female eye ; the 
art of throwing the handkerchief has not been included 
in his early curriculum. The American dancing man 
does not dare to arrive just in time for supper or to 
lounge in the doorway while dozens of girls line the 
walls in faded expectation of a waltz. The English 
girl lierself can hardly be blamed for this state of things. 
She has been brought up to think that marriage is the 
be-all and end-all of her existence. '' For my part," 
writes the author of " Cecil, the Coxcomb," '' I never 
blame them when I see them capering and show^ing off 
their little monkey-tricks, for conquest. The fault is 
none of theirs. It is part of an erroneous system." 
Lady Jeune expresses the orthodox English position 
when she asserts flatly that '' to deny that marriage 
is the object of woman's existence is absurd." The 
anachronistic survival of the laws of primogeniture and 
entail practically makes the marriage of the daughter 
the only alternative for a descent to a lower sphere of 
society. In the United States the proportion of girls who 
strike one as obvious candidates for marriage is remark- 
ably small. This may be owing to the art with which 
the American woman conceals her lures, but all the evi- 
dence points to its being in the main an entirely natural 
and unconscious attitude. The American girl has all 
along been so accustomed to associate on equal terms with 
the other sex that she naturally and inevitably regards 
him more in the light of a comrade than of a possible 



An Appreciiition of the American Woman 55 

husband. She has so many resources, and is so inde- 
pendent, that marriage does not bound her horizon. 

Her position, however, is not one of antagonism to 
marriage. If it were, I should be the last to commend 
it. It rather rests on an assurance of equality, on the 
assumption that marriage is an honourable estate — a 
rounding and completing of existence — for man as 
much as for woman. Nor does it mean, I think, any 
lack of passion and tlie deepest instincts of womanhood. 
All these are present and can be wakened by the riglit 
man at the right time. Indeed, the ver}- fact that mar- 
riage (with or without love) is not incessantly in the 
foreground of an American girl's consciousness probably 
makes the awakening all the more deep and tender 
because comparatively unanticipated and unforeseen. 

The marriages between American heiresses and Euro- 
pean peers do not militate seriously against the above 
view of American marriage. It cannot be sufficiently 
empliasised that the doings of a few wealthy people in 
New York are not characteristic of American civilisa- 
tion. The New York Times was entirely right when it 
said, in commenting upon the frank statement of tlie 
bridegroom in a recent alliance of this kind that it had 
been ay^mnged by friends of both parties : " A few years 
ago this frankness would have cost him his bride, if his 
' friends ' had chosen an American girl for that distinc- 
tion, and even now it would be resented to the point of 
a rupture of the engagement by most American girls." 

The American girl may not be in realit}^ better edu- 
cated than her British sister, nor a more profound 
thinker ; but her mind is indisputably more agile and 
elastic. In fact, a slow-going Britisher has to go through 



56 The Land of Contrasts 

a regular course of training before lie can follow the 
rapid transitions of her train of associations. She has 
the liappiest faculty in getting at another's point of 
A'iew and in putting herself in his place. Her imagina- 
tion is more likely to he over-active than too sluggish. 
One of the most })opular classes of the " Society for the 
Encouragement of Study at Home " is that devoted to 
imaginary travels in Europe. She is wonderfully adapt- 
able, and makes herself at ease in an entirely strange 
milieu almost before the transition is complete. Both 
M. Blouet and M. Bourget notice this, and claim that it 
is a quality she shares with the Frenchwoman. The 
Avife of a recent President is a stock illustration of it — 
a girl who was transferred in a moment from what we 
should call a quiet " middle-class " existence to the apex 
of publicit}^, and comported herself in the most trying 
situations with the ease, dignity, unconsciousness, taste, 
and graciousness of a born princess. 

The innocence of the American girl is neither an affec- 
tation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity. 
The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her 
American compaev furchtba)* frei, but she had at once to 
add und furehthar fi'omm. " The innocence of the Amer- 
ican girl passes abysses of obscenity without stain or 
knowledge." She may be perfectly able to hold her own 
under any circumstances, but she has little of that detest- 
able quality which we call "knowing." The immortal 
Daisy Miller is a charming illustration of this. I used 
sometimes to get into trouble with American ladies, who 
" hoped I did not take Daisy Miller as a type of the 
average American girl," by assuring them that " I did 
not — that I thought her much too good for that." And 



• I 



An Appreciation of the American Woman 57 

ill truth there seemed to me a hick of suhtlety in the 
current appreciation of the charming young hidy from 
Schenectady, who is much finer than many readers give 
lier credit for. And on this point I think I may cite 
Mr. Henry James himself as a witness on my side, since, 
in a dramatic version of the tale published in the Atlantic 
Monthly (Vol. 51, 1883), he makes his immaculate Bos- 
tonian, Mr. Winterbourne, marry Daisy with a full con- 
sciousness of all she was and had been. As I understand 
her, Miss Daisy Miller, in spite of her somewhat unpro- 
pitious early surroundings, was a young woman entirely 
aljle to appreciate the very best when she met it. She 
at once recognised tlie superiority of Winterbourne to 
the men she had hitherto known, and she also recognised 
that her " style " was not the " style " of him or of his 
associates. But she was very young, and had all the 
unreasonable pride of extreme youth ; and so she de- 
termined not to alter her behaviour one jot or tittle in 
order to attract him — nay, with a sort of bravado, she 
exaggerated tliose very traits which she knew he dis- 
liked. Yet all the time she had the highest appreciation 
of his most delicate refinements, while she felt also that 
he ought to see that at bottom she was just as refined as 
he, though her outward mask was not so elegant. I have 
no doubt whatever that, as Mrs. Winterbourne.^ she 
adapted herself to her new milieu with absolute success, 
and yet without loss of her own most fascinating indi- 
viduality.* 

^ Since writing the above I have learned that Mr. W. D. Howells has 
written of '* Daisy Miller " in a similar vein, speaking of her " indestructible 
innocence and her invulnerable new-worldliness." " It was so plain that Mr. 
Jaracs disliked her vulgar conditions that the very people to whom he revealed 
her essential sweetness and liglit were furious that he should have seemed not 
to see what existed throu<rh him," 



58 The Land of Contrasts 

The whole atmosphere of the country tends to pre- 
serve the spirit of unsuspecting innocence in the Amer- 
ican maiden. The function of a chaperon is very 
differently interpreted in the United States and in Eng- 
land. On one occasion I met in a Pullman car a young 
lady travelling in charge of her governess. A chance 
conversation elicited the fact that she Avas the daughter 
of a well-known New York hanker ; and the fact that we 
had some mutual acquaintances was accepted as all- 
sufficing credentials for my respectability. We had 
happened to fix on the same hotel at our destination ; 
and in the evening, after dinner, I met in the corridor 
the staid and severe-looking gouvernante^ who saluted me 
with '' Oh, Mr. Muirhead, I have such a headache I 
Would you mind going out with my little girl while she 
makes some purchases ? " I Avas a little taken aback at 
first ; but a moment's reflection convinced me that I had 
just experienced a most striking tribute to the honour 
of the American man and the social atmosphere of the 
United States. 

The psychological method of suggestive criticism has, 
perhaps, never been applied with more delicacy of intel- 
ligence than in M. Bourget's chapter on the American 
woman. Each stroke of the pen, or rather each turn of 
the scalpel, amazes us by its keen penetration. As we at 
last close the book and meditate on Avhat we have read, 
it is little by little borne in upon us that though due 
tribute is paid to the charming traits of the American 
woman, yet the general outcome of M. Bourget's analy- 
sis is truly damnatory. If this sprightly, fascinating, 
somewhat hard and calculating young woman be a true 
picture of the transatlantic maiden, Ave may sigh indeed 



An Appreciation of the American Woman 59 

for her lack of the Ewig Welhliche. I clo not pretend to 
say where M. Bourget's appreciation is at fault, but that 
it is false — unaccountably false — in the general impres- 
sion it leaves, I have no manner of doubt. Perhaps his 
attention has been fixed too exclusively on the Newport 
girl, Avho, it must again be insisted on, is too much 
impregnated with cosmopolitan fin de sieele-ism to be 
taken as the American type. Botanise a flower, use tlie 
strongest glasses you will, tear apart and name and 
analyse, — the result is a catalogue, the flower with its 
beauty and perfume is not there. So M. Bourget has 
catalogued the separate qualities of the American 
woman ; as a whole she has eluded his analysis. Per- 
haps this chapter of his may be taken as an eminent 
illustration of the limitations of the critical jnethod, 
which is at times so illuminating, while at times it so 
utterly fails to touch the heart of things, or, better, the 
wholeness of things. 

Among the most searching tests of the state of civil- 
isation reached by any country are the character of its 
roads, its minimising of noise, and the position of its 
women. If the United States does not stand very high 
on the application of the first two tests, its name assur- 
edly leads all the rest in the third. In no other country 
is the legal status of women so high or so well secured, 
or their right to follow an independent career so fully 
recognised by society at large. In no other country is 
so much done to provide for their convenience and com- 
fort. All the professions are open to them, and the 
opportunity has widely been made use of. Teaching, 
lecturing, journalism, preaching, and the practice of 
medicine have long been recognised as within woman's 



6o The Land of Contrasts 

sphere, and she is by no means unknown at the bar. 
There are eighty quaUfied lady doctors in Boston alone, 
and twenty-five lady lawyers in Chicago. A business 
card before me as I write reads, " Mesdames Foster & 
Steuart, Members of the Cotton Exchange and Board 
of Trade, Real Estate and Stock Brokers, 143 Main 
Street, Houston, Texas." The American woman, how- 
ever, is often found in still more unexpected occupa- 
tions. There are numbers of women dentists, barbel's, 
and livery-stable keepers. Miss Emily Faithful saw a 
railway pointswoman in Georgia ; and one of the regular 
steamers on Lake Champlain, when I was there, was 
successfully steered by a pilot in petticoats. There is 
one profession that is closed to Avomen in the United 
States — that of barmaid. That professional associa- 
tion of woman with man Avhen he is apt to be in his 
most animal moods is firmly tabooed in America — all 
honour to it ! 

The career of a lady whose acquaintance I made in 
New York, and whom 1 shall call Miss Undereast, illus- 
trates the possibilities open to the American girl. Born 
in Iowa, Miss Undereast lost her mother when she was 
three years old, and spent her early childhood in com- 
pany with her father, who was a travelling geologist and 
mining prospector. She could ride almost before she could 
walk, and soon l^ecame an expert shot. Once, when only 
ten years of age, she shot down an Indian who was in 
the act of killing a white woman with his tomahawk ; 
and on another occasion, when her father's camp was 
surrounded by hostile Indians, she galloped out upon her 
pony and brought relief. '' She was so much at home 
with the shy, wild creatures of the woods that she learned 



An Appreciation of the American Woman 6i 

tlieir calls, and they would come to her like so many 
domestic birds and animals. She would come into camp 
Avith wild birds and squirrels on her shoulder. She 
could lasso a steer with the best of them. When, at 
last, she went to graduate at the State University of 
Colorado, she paid for her last year's tuition with the 
proceeds of her own herd of cattle." After graduating 
at Colorado State University, she took a full course in a 
commercial college, and then taught school for some time 
at Denver. Later she studied and taught music, for 
which she had a marked gift. The next important step 
l)rouglit her to New York, where she gained in a com- 
petitive examination the position of secretary in the office 
of the Street Cleaning Department. Her linguistic 
accomplishments (for she had studied several foreign 
languages) stood her in good stead, and during the ill- 
ness of her chief she practically managed the depart- 
ment and '' bossed " fifteen hundred Italian labourers in 
their own tongue. Miss Undereast carried on her musical 
studies far enough to be offered a position in an oper- 
atic company, while her linguistic studies qualified her 
for the post of United States Custom House Inspectress. 
J^atterly she has devoted her time mainly to journalism 
and literature, producing, inter alia, a guidebook to New 
York, a novel, and a volume of essays on social topics. 
It is a little difficult to realise when talking with the 
accomplished and womanly litterateur that she has been 
in her day a slayer of Indians and "a mighty huntress 
before tlie Lord ; " but l)oth the facts and tlie opportu- 
nities underlying them testify in the most striking man- 
ner to tlie largeness of the sphere of action open to tlie 
puelht Americana. 



The Land of Contrasts 



If American women have heen well treated hy their 
men-folk, they have nohly discharged their debt. It is 
trite to refer to the numerous schemes of philanthropy 
in which American women have played so prominent a 
part, to allude to the fact that they have as a body used 
their leisure to cultivate those arts and graces of life 
which the preoccupation of man has led him too often 
to neglect. This chapter may well close with the words 
of Professor Bryce : ''No country seems to owe more to 
its Avomen than America does, nor to owe to them so 
much of what is best in its social institutions and in the 
beliefs that govern conduct." 



V 

The American Child 

THE United States has sometimes been called 
the '' Paradise of Women ; " from the child's 
point of view it might equally well he termed 
the " Paradise of Children," though the 
thoughtful observer might be inclined to qualify the title 
by the prefix " Fool's." Nowhere is the child so con- 
stantly in evidence ; nowhere are his wishes so carefully 
consulted ; nowhere is he allowed to make his mark so 
strongly on society in general. The difference begins at 
the very moment of his birth, or indeed even sooner. 
As much fuss is made over each young republican as if 
he were the heir to a long line of kings ; his swaddling 
clothes might make a ducal infant jealous ; the family 
physician thinks 1100 or '|150 a moderate fee for usher- 
ing him into the light of day. Ordinary milk is not good 
enough for him; sterilised milk will hardly do; '^modi- 
fied " milk alone is considered fit for this democratic 
suckling. Even the father is expected to spend hours 
in patient consultation over his food, his dress, his teetli- 
ing-rings, and his outgoing. He is weighed daily, and 
his nourishment is changed at once if he is a fraction 
either behind or ahead of what is deemed a normal and 
healthy rate of growth. American writers on tlie cai-e 
of children give directions for the use of the most com- 
plex and time-devouring devices for tlie proper prepara- 



64 The Land of Contrasts 

tion of their food, and seem really to expect that mamma 
and nurse Avill go through with the prescril)ed juggling 
Avith pots and pans, cylinders and lamps. 

A little later the importance of the American child is 
just as evident, though it takes on different forms. Tlie 
small American seems to consider himself the father of 
tlie man in a way never contemplated by the poet. He 
interrupts the conversation of his elders, he has a voice 
in ever}^ matter, he eats and drinks what seems good to 
him, he (or at au}^ rate she') wears hnger-rings of price, 
he has no shyness or even modesty. The theory of the 
equality of man is rampant in the nursery (though I use 
this word only in its conventional and figurative sense, 
hn- American children do not confine themselves to their 
nurseries). You will actually hear an American mother 
say of a child of two or three years of age : " I can't liidure 
him to do this ; " " She wont go to bed when I tell her ; " 
'' She will eat that lemon pie, though I knotv it is bad for 
her." Even the public authorities seem to recognise the 
inherent right of the American child to have liis own 
way, as the following paragraph from the Ncav York 
Herald of April 8, 1896, will testify : 

Washixgtox, April 7. — The lawn in front of the AVhite 
House this morning was littered with paper bags, the dyed 
shells of eggs, and the remains of Easter luncheon baskets. 
It is said that a large part of the lawn must be resodded. 
The children, shut out from their usual romp in the grounds 
at the back of the mansion, made their way into the front 
when the sun came out in the afternoon, and gambolled 
a])out at will, to the great injury of the rain-soaked turf. 

The police stationed in the grounds vain If/ endeavored 
to persuade tlw i/oun<jfiters to <jo aivai/^ and were finally sue- 



The American Child 65 

cessful only through pretending to be about to close all the 
gates for the night. 

It is, perhaps, superfluous to sa}^ that this kind of 
bringing up hardly tends to make tlie American child an 
attractive object to the stranger from without. On the 
contrary, it is very apt to make the said stranger long 
strenuously to spank these l)udding citizens of a free 
republic, and to send them to bed instayiter. So much 
of what I want to say on this topic has been well said 
])y my brother Findlay Muirhead in an article on " The 
American Small Boy," contributed to the St. James's 
Gazette^ that I venture to quote the bulk of that article 
below. 

The American Small Boy 

The American small boy is represented in history by 
the youthful George Washington, who suffered through his 
inability to invent a plausible fiction, and by Benjamin 
Franklin, whose abnormal simplicity in the purchase of 
musical instruments has become proverbial. But history 
is not taken down in shorthand as it occurs, and it some- 
times lags a little. The modern American small boy is a 
vastly different being from either of these transatlantic 
worthies ; at all events his most prominent characteristics, 
as they strike a stranger, are not illustrated in the earlier 
period of their career. 

The peculiarities of young America would, indeed, matter 
but little to the stranger if young America stayed at home. 
But young America does not stay at home. It is not neces- 
sary to track the American small boy to his native haunts 
in order to see what he is like. He is very much in evi- 
dence even on this side the Atlantic. At certain seasons 
he circulates in Europe with the facility of the British sov- 



66 The Land of Contrasts 

ereign ; for the American nation cherishes the true nomadic 
habit of travelling in families, and the small boy is not left 
behind. He abounds in Paris ; he is common in Italy ; and 
he is a drug in Switzerland. He is an element to be allowed 
for by all who make the G-rand Tour, for his voice is heard 
in every land. On the Continent, during the season, no first- 
class hotel can be said to be complete without its American 
family, including the small boy. He does not, indeed, ap- 
pear to " come off " to his full extent in this country, but in 
all Continental resorts he is a small boy that may be felt, 
as probably our fellow-countrymen all over Europe are now 
discovering. 

There is little use in attempting to disguise the fact that 
the subject of the present paper is distinctly disagreeable. 
There is little beauty in him that we should desire him. 
He is not only restless himself, but he is the cause of rest- 
lessness in others. He has no respect even for the quies- 
cent evening hour, devoted to cigarettes on the terrace after 
tabic (Vhote, and he is not to be overawed by a look. It is 
a constant source of wonder to the thoughtfully inclined 
how the American man is evolved from the American boy ; 
it is a problem much more knotty than the difficulty con- 
cerning apple-dumplings which so perplexed " Farmer 
George." No one need desire a pleasanter travelling com- 
panion than the American man; it is impossible to imagine 
a more disagreeable one than the American boy. 

The American small boy is precocious ; but it is not with 
the erudite precocity of the German Heinecken, who at 
three years of age was intimately acquainted with history 
and geography ancient and modern, sacred and profane, 
besides being able to converse fluently in Latin, French, 
and German. We know, of course, that each of the 
twenty-two Presidents of the United States gave such lively 



The American Child 67 

promise in his youth that twenty -two aged friends of the 
twenty -two families, without any collusion, placed their 
hands upon the youthful heads, pro])hesying their future 
eniine . . \ But even this remarkable coincidence does not 
affect the fact that the precocity of the average trans- 
atlantic boy is not generally in the most useful branches 
of knowledge, but rather in the direction of habits, tastes, 
and opinion. He is not, however, evenly precocious. He 
unites a taste for jewelry with a passion for candy. He 
combines a penetration into the motives of others with an 
infantile indifference to exposing them at inconvenient 
times. He has an adult decision in his wishes, but he has 
a youthful shamelessness in seeking their fulfilment. One 
of his most exasperating peculiarities is the manner in 
which he querulously harps upon the single string of his 
wants. He sits down before the refusal of his mother and 
shrilly besieges it. He does not desist for company. He 
does not wish to behave well before strangers. He desires 
to have his wish granted ; and he knows he will probably 
be allowed to succeed if he insists before strangers. He is 
distinguished by a brutal frankness, combined with a cynical 
disregard for all feminine ruses. He not seldom calls up 
the blush of shame to the cheek of scheming innocence ; and 
he frequently crucifies his female relatives. He is gener- 
ally an adept in discovering what will most annoy his 
family circle ; and he is perfectly unscrupulous in aveng- 
ing himself for all injuries, of which he receives, in his 
own opinion, a large number. He has an accurate memory 
for all promises made to his advantage, and he is relentless 
in exacting payment to the uttermost farthing. He not 
seldom displays a singular ingenuity in interpreting am- 
biguous terms for his own behoof. A youth of this kind 
is reported to have demanded (and received) eight apples 



68 The Land of Contrasts 

from his mother, who had bribed him to temporary stillness 
by the promise of a few of that fruit, his ground being that 
the Scriptures contained the sentence, " AV^herein few, that 
is, eight, souls were saved by water.'' 

The American small boy is possessed, moreover, of a 
well-nigh invincible (iplonih. He is not impertinent, for it 
jiever enters into his head to take up the position of pro- 
testing inferiority which impertinence implies. He merely 
takes things as they come, and does not hesitate to express 
his opinion of them. An American young gentleman of the 
mature age of ten was one day overtaken by a fault. His 
father, more in sorrow than in anger, expressed his displeas- 
ure. '' What am I to do with you, Tommy ? What am I to do 
with you ? ■' '' I have no suggestions to offer, sir," was the 
response of Tommy, thus appealed to. Even in trying cir- 
cumstances, even Avhen serious misfortune overtakes the 
youthful American, his aplomb, his confidence in his own 
opinion, does not wholly forsake him. Such a one was found 
weeping in the street. On being asked the cause of his tears, 
he sobbed out in mingled alarm and indignation : " I'm lost ; 
mammy's lost me ; I told the darned thing she'd lose me." 
The recognition of his own liability to be lost, and at the 
same time the recognition of his own superior wisdom, are 
ex(^uisitely characteristic. They would be quite incongru- 
ous in the son of any other soil. In his intercourse with 
strangers this feeling exhibits itself in the complete self- 
possession and so/if/ -fro id of the youthful citizen of the 
Western Republic. He scorns to own a curiosity which he 
dare not openly seek to satisfy by direct questions, and he 
puts his questions accordingly on all subjects, even the 
most private and even in the case of the most reverend 
strangers. He is perfectly free in his remarks upon all 
that strikes him as strange or reprehensible in any one's 



The American Child 69 

personal appearance or behaviour; and lie never dreams 
that his victims might })rel'er not to be criticised in public. 
But he is quick to resent criticism on himself, and he shows 
the most perverted ingenuity in embroiling with his family 
any outsider who may rashly attempt to restrain his ebulli- 
tions. He is, in fact, like the Scottish thistle : no one may 
meddle with him with impunity. It is better to " never 
mind him," as one of the evils under the sun for which 
there is no remedy. 

Probably this development of the American small boys 
is due in great measure to the absorption of their fathers 
in business, which necessarily surrenders the former to a 
too undiluted " regiment of women." For though Thack- 
eray is unquestionably right in estimating highly the in- 
fluence of rcilined feminine society upon youths and young 
men, there is no doubt that a small boy is all the better for 
contact with some one whose physical prowess commands 
his respect. Some allowance must also be made for the 
l^eevishness of boys condemned to prolonged railway 
journeys, and to the confinement of hotel life in cities and 
scenes in which they are not old enough to take an interest. 
They would, doubtless, be more genial if they were left 
behind at school. 

The American boy has no monopoly of the character- 
istics under consideration. His little sister is often his 
equal in all departments. Miss Alarryat tells of a little 
girl of five who appeared alone in the table d'hote room 
of a large and fashionable hotel, ordered a copious and 
variegated breakfast, and silenced the timorous misgiv- 
ings of the waiter with " I guess I pay my way." At 
another hotel I heard a similar little minx, in a fit of 
infantile rage, address her mother as " You nasty, mean, 



7o The Land of Contrasts 

old crosspatcli ; " and the hitter, who in other respects 
seemed a very sensible and intelligent woman, yielded 
to the storm, and had no words of rehnke. I am afraid 
it was a little hoy who in the same way called liis father 
a "hlack-eyed old skunk;" but it might just as well 
have been a girl. 

While not asserting that all American children are of 
this brand, I do maintain that the sketch is fairly typical 
of a very large class — perhaps of all except those of 
exceptionally firm and sensible parents. The strangest 
thing about the matter is, however, that the fruit does 
not by any means correspond to the seed ; the wind is 
sown, but the whirlwind is not reaped. The unendur- 
able child does not necessarily become an intolerable 
man. By some mysterious chemistry of the American 
atmosphere, social or otherwise, the horrid little minx 
blossoms out into a cliarming and womanly girl, with 
just enough of independence to make her piquant ; the 
cross and dyspeptic little boy becomes a courteous and 
amiable man. Some sort of a moral miracle seems to 
take place about the age of fourteen or fifteen ; a violent 
dislocation interrupts the natural continuity of pi'ogress ; 
and, presto ! out springs a new creature from the modern 
cauldron of Medea. 

The reason — or at any rate one reason — of the normal 
attitude of the American parent towards his child is not 
far to seek. It is almost undoubtedly one of the direct 
consequences of the circumambient spirit of democracy. 
The American is so accustomed to recognise the essential 
equality of others that he sometimes carries a good thing 
to excess. This spirit is seen in his dealings with under- 
lings of all kinds, who are rarely addressed with the 



The American Child 



bkmtness and bnisqueness of the older civihsations. 
Hence tlie father and mother are apt to lay almost too 
much stress on the se[)arate and individual entity of their 
child, to shun too scrupulously anything approaching 
the violent coercion of another's will. That the results 
are not more disastrous seems owing to a saving quality 
in the child himself. The characteristic American 
shrewdness and common sense do their work. A badly 
l)rouglit up American child introduced into a really well- 
regulated family soon takes his cue from his surround- 
ings, adapts himself to his new conditions, and sheds his 
faults as a snake its skin. The whole process may tend 
to increase the individuality of the child ; but the cost 
is often great, the consequences hard for the child itself. 
American parents are doubtless more familiar than others 
with the plaintive remonstrance : " Why did you not 
bring me up more strictly ? Why did you give me so 
much of my own way ? " The present type of the Amer- 
ican child may be described as one of the experiments of 
democracy ; that he is not a necessary type is proved by 
the by no means insignificant number of excellently 
trained children in the United States, of whom it has 
never been asserted that they make any less truly 
democratic citizens than their more pampered play- 
mates. 

The idea of establishing sunnner camps for school- 
children may not have originated in tlie United States 
— it was certainly put into operation in Switzerland and 
France several years ago; but the most characteristic 
and highly organised institution of the kind is the George 
Junior Republic at Freeville, near Ithaca, in the State of 
New York, and some account of this attempt to recog- 



72 The Land of Contrasts 

nise the " rights of children," and develop the political 
capacity of boys and girls, may form an appropriate end- 
ing to this chapter. The republic was established by 
Mr. William R. George, in 1895. It occupies a large 
tent and several wooden buildings on a farm forty-eight 
acres in extent. In summer it accommodates about two 
hundred boys and girls between the ages of twelve and 
seventeen ; and about forty of these remain in residence 
throughout the year. The republic is self-governing, 
and its economic basis is one of honest industry. Every 
citizen has to earn his living, and his work is paid for 
with the tin currency of the republic. Half of the day 
is devoted to work, the other half to recreation. The 
boys are employed in farming and carpentry ; the girls 
sew, cook, and so on. The rates of wages vary from 50 
cents to 90 cents a day according to the grade of work. 
Ordinary meals cost about 10 cents, and a night's lodg- 
ing the same ; but those who have the means and the 
inclination may have more sumptuous meals for 25 cents, 
or board at the " Waldorf " for about -$4 (16s.) a week. 
As the regular work offered to all is paid for at rates 
amply sufhcient to cover the expenses of board and lodg- 
ing, the idle and improvident have either to go without 
or make up for their neglect by overtime work. Those 
who save money receive its full value on leaving the 
republic, in clothes and provisions to take back to their 
homes in the slums of New York. Some boys have been 
known to save $50 (XIO) in the two months of summer 
work. The republic has its own legislature, court-house, 
jail, schools, and the like. The legislature has two 
branches. The members of the lower house are elected 
by ballot weekly, those of the senate fortnightly. Each 



The American Child 73 

grade of labour elects one member and one senator for 
every twelve constituents. Offences against the laws of 
the republic are stringently dealt with, and the jail, with 
its bread-and-water diet, is a by no means pleasant expe- 
rience. The police force consists of thirteen boys and 
two girls ; the office of " cop," with its wages of 90 cents 
a day, is eagerly coveted, but cannot be obtained without 
the passing of a stiff civil service examination. 

So far this interesting experiment is said by good 
authorities to have worked well. It is not a socialistic or 
Utopian scheme, but frankly accepts existing conditions 
and tries to make the best of them. It is not by any 
means merely " playing at house." The children have 
to do genuine work, and learn habits of real industry, 
thrift, self-restraint, and independence. The measures 
discussed by the legislature are not of the debating 
society order, but actually affect the personal welfare of 
the two hundred citizens. It has, for example, been 
found necessary to impose a duty of twenty-five per cent. 
" on all stuff' brought in to be sold," so as to protect the 
native farmer. Female suffrage has been tried, but did 
not work well, and was discarded, largely through the 
votes of the girls themselves. 

The possible disadvantages connected with an experi- 
ment of this kind easily suggest themselves ; but since 
the " precocity " of the American child is a recognised 
fact, it is perhaps well that it should be turned into such 
unobjectionable channels. 



VI 



International Misapprehensions and 
National Differences 

SOME years ago I was visiting the cyclorama of 
Niagara Falls in London and listening to the 
intelligent description of the scene given by the 
"lecturer." In the course of this he pointed 
out Goat Island, the wooded islet that j)arts the head- 
long waters of the Niagara like a coulter and shears 
them into the separate falls of the American and Cana- 
dian shores. Behind me stood an English lady who did 
not quite catch what the lecturer said, and turned to 
her husband in surprise. "Rhode Island? Well, I 
knew Rhode Island was one of the smallest States, Init 
I had no idea it was so small as that ! " On another 
occasion an Englishman, invited to smile at the idea of 
a fellow-countryman that the Rocky Mountains flanked 
the west bank of the Hudson, exclaimed : " How ab- 
surd ! The Rocky Mountains must be at least two 
hundred miles from the Hudson." Even so intelligent 
a traveller and so friendly a critic as Miss Florence 
Marryat (Mrs. Francis Lean), in her desire to do justice 
to the amplitude of the American continent, gravely 
asserts that " Pennsylvania covers a tract of land larger 
than England, France, Spain, and Germany all put 
together," the real fact being that even the smallest of 
the countries named is much larger than the State, Avhile 
the combined area of the four is more than fourteen 
times as great. Texas, the largest State in the Union, is 

74 



Intel-national Misapprehensions 75 

not so very much more extensive than either Germany 
or France. 

An analogous want of acquaintance with the mental 
geography of America was sliown l)y the Englisli lady 
whom Mr. Freeman heard explaining to a cultivated 
American friend who Sir Walter Scott was, and what 
were the titles of his chief works. 

It is to such international ignorance as this that much, 
if not most, of the British want of appreciation of the 
United States may be traced ; just as the acute critic 
may see in the complacent and persistent misspelling of 
English names by the leading journals of Paris an index 
of that French attitude of indifference towards foreigners 
that involved the possibility of a Sedan. It is not, per- 
haps, easy to adduce exactly parallel instances of Ameri- 
can ignorance of Great Britain, though Mr. Henry 
James, who probably knows his England better than 
nine out of ten Englishmen, describes Lord Lambeth, the 
eldest son of a duke, as himself a member of the House 
of Lords ("An International Episode"). It was amus- 
ing to find when wieine Wenigkeit was made the object 
of a lesson in a Massachusetts school, that many of the 
children knew the name England only in connection 
with their own New England home. Nor, I fear, can it 
be denied that much of the historical teaching in the 
primary schools of the United States gives a somewhat 
one-sided view of the past relations between the mother 
country and her revolted daughter. The American 
child is not taught as much as he ought to be that the 
English people of to-day repudiate the attitude of the 
aristocratic British government of 1770 as strongly as 
Americans themselves. 



76 The Land of Contrasts 

The American, however, must not phime himself too 
much on his superior knowledge. Shameful as the 
British ignorance of America often is, a corresponding 
American ignorance of Great Britain would he vastly 
more shameful. An American cannot understand liim- 
self unless he knows something of his origins heyond the 
seas ; the geography and history of an American child 
must perforce include the history and geography of the 
British Isles. For a Briton, however, knowledge of 
America is rather one of the highly desirable things 
than one of the absolutely indispensable. It Avould cer- 
tainly betoken a certain want of humanity in me if I 
failed to take any interest in the welfare of my sons and 
daughters who had emigrated to New Zealand ; but it 
is evident that for the conduct of my own life a knowl- 
edge of their doings is not so essential for me as a 
knowledge of what my father was and did. The Ameri- 
can of Anglo-Saxon stock visiting Westminster Abbey 
seems paralleled alone by the Greek of Syracuse or 
Magna Grpecia visiting tlie Acropolis of Athens ; and tlie 
experience of either is one that less favoured mortals may 
unfeignedly envy. But the American and the Syracusan 
alike would be wrong were he to feel either scorn or 
elation at the superiority of the guest's knowledge of the 
host over the host's knowledge of the guest. 

However that may be, and whatever latitude we allow- 
to the proverbial connection of familiarity and contempt, 
there seems little reason to doubt that closer knowledge 
of one another will but increase the mutual sympathy 
and esteem of the Briton and the American. The 
former will find that Brother Jonathan is not so exuber- 
antly and perpetually starred-and-striped as the comic 



International Misapprehensions 77 

cartoonist would have us believe ; and the American 
will find that John Bull does not always wear top-boots 
or invariably wield a whip. Things that from a distance 
seem preposterous and even revolting will often assume 
a very different guise when seen in their native environ- 
ment and judged by their inevitable conditions. It is 
not always true that " coelum no7i aimnum mutant qui 
trans mare currunt " — that is, if we allow ourselves to 
translate " animum " in its Ciceronian sense of " opinion." ^ 
To hold this view does not make any excessive demand 
on our optimism. There seems absolutely no reason 
why in this particular case the line of cleavage between 
one's likes and one's dislikes should coincide with that 
of foreign and native birth. The very word '^ foreign" 
rings false in this connection. It is often easier to 
recognise a brother in a New Yorker than in a York- 
shireman, while, alas ! it is only theoretically and in a 
mood of long-drawn-out aspiration that we can love our 
alien-tongued European neighbour as ourselves. 

The man who wishes to form a sound judgment of 
another is bound to attain as great a measure as pos- 
sible of accurate self-knowledge, not merely to under- 
stand the reaction of the foreign character when brought 
into relation with his own, but also to make allowance 
for fundamental differences of taste and temperament. 
The golden rule of judging others by ourselves can easily 
become a dull and leaden despotism if we insist that 
what we should think and feel on a given occasion 
ought also to be the thoughts and actions of the French- 
man, the German, or the American. There are, perhaps, 
no more pregnant sentences in Mr. Bryce's valuable 

1 See, e.g.y •' Ad Farailiares," 5, 18. 



78 The Land of Contrasts 

book than those in which he warns his British readers 
against the assumption that the same phenomena in 
two different countries must imply the same sort of 
causes. Thus, an e(pial amount of corruption among 
I>ritish politicians, or an equal amount of vulgarity 
in the British press, would argue a much greater 
degree of rottenness in the general social system than 
the same phenomena in the United States. So, too, 
some of the characteristic British vices are, so to say, 
of a spontaneous, involuntary, semi-unconscious growth, 
and the American observer would commit a griev- 
ous error if he ascribed them to as deliberate an intent 
to do evil as the same tendencies Avould betoken in his 
own land. Neither Briton nor American can do full 
justice to the other unless each recognises that the other 
is fashioned of a somewhat different clay. 

The strong reasons, material and otherwise, wh}^ 
Great Britain and the United States should be friends 
need not be enumerated here. In spite of some recent 
and highly unexpected shocks, the tendencies that make 
for amity seem to me to be steadily increasing in strength 
and volume.^ It is the American in the making rather 
than the matured native product that, as a rule, is guilty 
of blatant denunciation of Great Britain ; and it is 
usually the un travelled and preeminently insular Briton 
alone that is utterly devoid of sympathy for his Ameri- 
can cousins. The American, as has often been pointed 
out, has become vastly more pleasant to deal with since 
his country has won an undeniable place among the 
foremost nations of the globe. The epidermis of Brother 

1 This was written just alter President Cleveland's pronunciamento in regard 
to Venezuela, and thus long before the outbreak of the war with Spain. 



International Misapprehensions 79 

Jonathan has toughened as he has grown in stature, and 
now that he can look over the heads of most of his com- 
peers he regards the sting of a gnat as little as the best 
of them. Perhaps not cpiite so little as John Bull, Avhose 
indifference to criticism and silent assurance of superi- 
( trity are possibly as far wrong in the one direction as a 
too irritable skin is in the other. 

Of the books written about the United States in the 
last score of years by European writers of any weight, 
there are few which have not helped to dissipate the 
grotesquely one-sided view of America formerly held in 
the Old World. Preeminent among such books is, of 
course, the " American Commonwealth " of Mr. James 
Bryce ; but such writers as Mr. Freeman, M. Paul 
Bourget, Sir George Campbell, Mr. William Sanders, 
Miss Catherine Bates, Mme. Blanc, Miss Emily Faith- 
ful, M. Paul de Rousiers, Max O'Rell, and Mr. Stevens 
have all, in their several degrees and to their several 
audiences, worked to the same end. It may, however, 
l)e worth while mentioning one or two literary perform- 
ances of a somewhat different character, merely to remind 
my British readers of tlie sort of thing we have done to 
exasperate our American cousins in quite recent times, 
and so help them to understand the why and wherefore 
of certain traces of resentment still lingering beyond 
the Atlantic. In 1884 Sir Lepel Griffin, a distinguished 
Indian official, published a record of his visit to the 
United States, under the title of "The Great Re- 
public." Perhaps this volume might have been left to 
the obscurity which has befallen it, were it not that 
Mr. Matthew Arnold lent it a fictitious importance by 
taking as the text for some of his own remarks on Amer- 



8o The Land of Contrasts 

ica Sir Lepel's assertion that he knew of no civilised 
countiy, Russia possibly excepted, where he should less 
like to live than the United States. To me it seems a 
Look most admirably adapted to infuriate even a less 
sensitive folk than the Americans. I do not in the least 
desire to ascribe to Sir Lepel Griffin a deliberate design 
to be offensive ; but it is just his calm, supercilious Pliil- 
istinism, aggravated no doubt by his many years' expe- 
rience as a ruler of submissive Orientals, that makes it 
no less a pleasure than a duty for a free and intelligent 
republican to resent and defy his criticisms. 

Can, for instance, anything more wantonly and point- 
lessly insulting be imagined than his assertion that an 
intelligent and well-informed American would probably 
name the pork-packing of Chicago as the thing best 
worth seeing in the United States ? After that it is not 
surprising that he considers American scenery singularly 
tame and unattractive, and that he finds female beauty 
(can his standard for this have been Orientalised ?) very 
rare. He predicts that it would be impossible to main- 
tain the Yellowstone National Park as such, and asserts 
that it was only a characteristic spirit of swagger and 
braggadocio that prompted this attempt at an impossible 
ideal. He also seems to think lynching an any-day pos- 
sibility in the streets of New York. The value of his 
forecasts may, however, be discounted by his prophecy 
in the same book that the London County Council would 
be merely a glorified vestry, utterly indifferent to the 
public interest, and unlikely to attract any candidates 
of distinction ! 

An almost equal display of Philistinism — perhaps 
greater in proportion to its length — is exhibited by an 



International Misapprehensions 8i 

article entitled " Twelve Hours of New York," published 
hy Count Gleichen in Murray's Magazine (February, 
1890). This energetic young man succeeded (in his 
own belief) in seeing all the sights of New York in the 
time indicated by the title of his article, and apparently 
met nothing to his taste except the Hoffman House 
bar and the large rugs with which the cab-horses were 
swathed. He found his hotel a den of incivility and 
his dinner "a squashy, sloppy meal." He wishes he 
had spent the day in Canada mstead. He is great in 
his scorn for the " glue kettle " helmets of the Ncav 
York police, and for the ferry-boats in the harbour, to 
which he vastly prefers what he wittily and originally 
styles the "common or garden steamer." His feet, in 
his own elegant phrase, felt " like a jelly " after four 
hours of New York pavement. What are the Ameri- 
cans to think of us when they find one of our innermost 
and most aristocratic circle writing stuff like this under 
the ffigis of, perhaps, the foremost of British publisliers ? 
As a third instance of the ingratiating manner in 
which Englishmen wiite of Americans, we may take the 
following paragraph from " Travel and Talk," an inter- 
esting record of much journeying by that well-known 
London clergyman, the Rev. H. R. Haweis : " Among 
the numerous kind attentions I was favoured with and 
somewhat embarrassed by was the assiduous hospitality 
of another singular lady, also since dead. I allude to 
Mrs. Barnard, the wife of the venerable principal of 
Columbia College, a well-known and admirably ap- 
pointed educational institution in New York. This 
good lady was bent upon our staying at the college, and 
hunted us from house to house until we took up our 



82 The Land of Contrasts 

abode with her, and, 1 confess, 1 found her rather amus- 
ing at first, and I am sure she meant most kindly. But 
there was an inconceivable fidgetiness about her, and an 
incapacity to let people alone, or even listen to anything 
tliey said in answer to her questions, which poured as 
from a quick-firing gun, that became at last intoler- 
able." Comment on this passage would be entirely 
superfluous ; but I cannot help drawing attention to the 
supreme touch of gracefulness added by the three words 
I have italicised. 

There is one English critic of American life whose 
opinion cannot be treated cavalierly — least of all by 
those who feel, as I do, how inestimable is our debt to 
him as a leader in the paths of sweetness and light. 
But even in the presence of Matthew Arnold I desire 
to preserve the attitude of " nidlms addictus jurare in 
vei'ha magistri^'' and I cannot but believe that his esti- 
mate of America, while including much that is subtle, 
clear-sighted, and tonic, is in certain respects inadequate 
and misleading. He unfortunately committed the mis- 
take of writing on the United States before visiting the 
country, and had made up his mind in advance that it 
w^as almost exclusively peopled by, and entirely run in 
the interests of, the British dissenting Philistine with a 
difference. 

It is the more to be regretted that he adopted this 
attitude of premature judgment of American character- 
istics because it is only too prevalent among his less dis- 
tinguished fellows-countrymen. From this position of 
pa7^ti pris, maintained with all his own inimitable suavity 
and grace, it seems to me that he was never wholly able 
to advance (or retire), though he candidly admitted that 



International Misapprehensions 83 

he found the difference between the British and Amer- 
ican PhiHstine vastly greater than he anticipated. The 
members of his preconceived syllogism seem to be some- 
Avhat as follows : the money-making and comfort-loving 
classes in England are essentially Philistine ; the United 
States as a nation is given over to money-making ; eryo^ 
its inhabitants must all be Philistines. Furthermore, the 
British Philistines are to a very large extent dissenters ; 
the United States has no established church; ergo^ it 
must be the Paradise of the dissenter. 

This line of argument ignores the fact that the stolid 
self-satisfaction in materialistic comfort, which he defines 
as the essence of Philistinism, is not a predominant trait 
in the American class in which our English experience 
would lead us to look for it. The American man of 
business, with his restless discontent and nervous, over- 
strained pursuit of wealtli, may not ])e a more inspiring 
ol)ject than his British brother, but he has little of the 
smugness which Mr. Arnold has tauglit us to associate 
Avith the label of Philistinism. And his w^omankind is 
perhaps even less open to this particular reproach. Mr. 
Arnokl ignores a whole far-reaching series of American 
social phenomena which have practically nothing in com- 
mon with British nonconformity, and lets a similarity 
of nomenclature blind him too much to the differentia- 
tion of entirely novel conditions. The Methodist '' Moon- 
shiner " of Tennessee is hardly cast in the same mould as 
the deacon of a London Little Bethel ; and even the most 
legitimate children of the Puritans have not descended 
from the conniion stock in parallel lines in England and 
America. 

Mr. xVrnold admitted that the political clothes of 



84 The Land of Contrasts 

Brother Jonathan fitted him admirably, and allowed 
that he can and does think straighter (^cest le honheur 
des liommes quand Us pensent juste^ than we can in the 
maze of our unnatural and antiquated complications ; he 
wholly admired the natural, unself conscious manner of 
the American woman ; he saw that the wage-earner 
lived more comfortably than in Europe ; he noted that 
wealthy Americans were not dogged by envy in the same 
way as in England, partly because wealth was felt to be 
more within the range of all, and partly because it was 
nuich less often used for the gratification of vile and 
selfish appetites ; he admitted that America was none 
the worse for the lack of a materialised aristocracy such 
as ours ; he praises the spirit which levels false and 
conventional distinctions, and waives the use of such 
invidious discriminations as our " Mr." and " Esquire." 
Admissions such as these, coming from such a man as 
he, are of untold value in promoting the growth of a 
proper sentiment towards our transatlantic kinsmen. 
When he points out that the dangers of such a commun- 
ity as the United States include a tendency to rely too 
much on the machinery of institutions ; an absence of the 
discipline of respect ; a proneness to hardness, materialism, 
exaggeration, and boastfulness ; a false smartness and a 
false audacity, — the wise American will do well to pon- 
der his sayings, hard though they may sound. When, 
however, he goes on to point out the '' prime necessity 
of civilisation being interesting," and to assert that 
American civilisation is lacking in interest, we may well 
doubt whether on the one hand the quality of interest is 
not too highly exalted, and, on the other, Avhether the 
denial of interest to American life does not indicate an 



International Misapprehensions 85 

almost insular narrowness in the conception of what is 
interesting. When he finds a want of soul and delicacy 
in the American as compared with John Bull, some of us 
must feel that if he is right the latitude of interpretation 
of these terms must indeed be oceanic. When he gravely 
cites the shrewd and ingenious Benjamin Franklin as 
the most considerable man Avhom America has yet pro- 
duced, we must respectfully but firmly take exception 
to his standard of measurement. When he declares that 
Abraham Lincoln has no claim to distinction, we feel 
that the writer must have in mind distinction of a sin- 
gularly conventional and superficial nature ; and we are 
not reassured by the quasi brutality of the remark in 
one of his letters, to the effect that Lincoln's assassina- 
tion brought into American history a dash of the tragic 
and romantic in which it had hitherto been so sadly 
lacking Q'- sic semper tyraymis is so unlike anything 
Yankee or English middle class "). When he asserts 
that from Maine to Florida and back again all America 
Hebraises, we reflect with some bewilderment that hith- 
erto we had believed the New Orleans Creole (e.y.^ to 
be as far removed from Hebraising as any type we knew 
of. It is strikingl}^ characteristic of the weak side of 
Mr. Arnold's outlook on America that he Avent to stay 
with Mr. P. T. Barnum, the celebrated showman, with- 
out the least idea that his American friends nnglit think 
the choice of hosts a peculiar one. To him, to a very 
Lirge extent, Americans were all alike middle-class, dis- 
senting Philistines ; and so far as appears on the surface, 
Mr. Barnum's desire to "belong to the minority" pleased" 
him as much as any other sign of approval conferred 
upon him in America. 



86 The Land of Contrasts 

A native of the British Isles is sometimes apt to be a 
little nettled when he finds a native of the United States 
regarding him as a " foreigner " and talking of him ac- 
cordingly. An Englishman never means the natives 
of the United States when he speaks of " foreigners ; " 
lie reserves that epithet for. non-English-speaking races. 
In this respect it would seem as if the Briton, for once, 
took the wider, the more genial and liuman, point of 
view ; as if he had the keener appreciation of the ties of 
race and language. It is as if he cherished continually 
a sub-dominant consciousness of tlie fact that the occu- 
pation of the North American continent by tlie Anglo- 
Saxons is one of the greatest events in English history 
— that America is peopled by Englishmen. When he 
thinks of the events of 1776 he feels, to use Mv. Hall 
Caine's illustration, like Dr. Johnson, Avho dreamed that 
he had been worsted in conversation, but reflected when 
he awoke that the conversation of his adversary nuist 
also have been his own. As opposed to this there may 
be a o-raiii of self-assertion in the American use of the 
term as applied to the British ; it is as if they would 
emphasise tlie fact that they are no mere offshoot of 
England, that the Colonial days have long since gone by, 
and that the United States is an independent nation 
with a right to have its own ''foreigners." An Ameri- 
can friend suggests that the different usage of the two 
lands may be partly owing to the fact that the cordial, 
frank demeanour of the American, coupled with his use 
of tlie same tongue, makes an Englishman absolutely 
forget that he is not a fellow-countryman, while the 
subtler American is keenly conscious of differences 
which escape the obtuser Englishman. Another partial 



International Misapprehensions 87 

explanation is that the lirst step across onr frontier 
brings us to a land where an unknown tongue is spoken, 
and that we have consequently welded into one the two 
ideas of foreignhood and unintelligibility ; while the 
American, on the other hand, identifies himself with his 
continent and regards all as foreigners who are not 
natives of it. 

The point would hardly be w^orth dwelling upon, were 
it not that the different attitude it denotes really leads 
in some instances to actual misunderstanding. The 
Englishman, with his somewhat unsensitive feelers, is 
apt, in all good faith and unconsciousness, to criticise 
American ways to the American with much more free- 
dom than he would criticise Fx^ench ways to a French- 
man. It is as if he should say, '' You and I are brothers, 
or at least cousins ; we are a much better sort than all 
those foreign Johnnies ; and so there's no harm in my 
pointing out to you that you're wrong here and ought to 
change there." But, alas, who is quicker to resent our 
criticism than they of our own household ? And so the 
American, overlooking the sort of clumsy com[)liment 
that is implied in the assurance of kinship involved in 
the very frankness of our fault-finding criticism, resents 
most keenly the criticisms that are couched in his own 
language, and sees nothing but impertinent hostility in 
the attitude of John liull. And who is to convince 
him that it is, as in a Scottish wooing, because we love 
him that we tease him, and in so doing put him (in our 
eyes) on a vastly higher pedestal than the "blasted 
foreigner " whose case we consider past praying for ? 
And who is to teach us that Brother Jonathan is able 
now to give us at least as many hints as we can give 



88 The Land of Contrasts 

him, and that we must realise that the same sauce must 
be served with both birds ? Thus each resiles from the 
encounter infinitely more pained than if the antagonist 
had been a German or a Frenchman. The very fact that 
we speak the same tongue often leads to false assump- 
tions of nuitual knowledge, and so to offences of un- 
guarded ignorance. 

One of the most conspicuous differences between the 
American and the Briton is that the former, take him 
for all in all, is distinctly the more articulate animal of 
the two. The Englishman seems to have learned, 
through countless generations, that he can express him- 
self better and more surely in deeds than in words, and 
has come to distrust in others a fatal fluency of expres- 
siveness which he feels would be exaggerated and even 
false in himself. A man often has to wait for his own 
death to find out what his English friend thinks of him ; 

and 

" Wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as others see us," 

we might often be surprised to discover what a wealth of 
real affection and esteem lies hid under the glacier of 
Anglican indifference. The American poet who found 
his song in the heart of a friend could have done so, 
were the friend English, only by the aid of a post-mortem 
examination. The American, on the other hand, has the 
most open and genial way of expressing his interest in 
you ; and when you have readjusted the scale of the 
moral thermometer so as to allow for the change of tem- 
perament, you will find this frankness most delightfully 
stimulating. It requires, however, an intimate knowl- 
edge of both countries to understand that when an Eng- 



International Misapprehensions 89 

lisliman congratulates you on a success by exclaiming, 
"- Hallo, old chap, I didn't knoAv you had it in you," he 
means just as much as your American friend, whose 
phrase is : '' Bravo, Billy, I always knew you could do 
something fine." 

That the superior powers of articulation possessed by 
the American sometimes takes the form of profuse and 
even extreme volubility will hardly be denied by those 
conversant with the facts. The American may not be 
more profound than his English cousin or even more 
fertile in ideas, but as a rule he is much more ready and 
easy in the discussion of the moment ; whatever the 
state of his '^ gold reserve " may be, he has no lack of 
the small counters of conversation. In its proper place 
this faculty is undoubtedly most agreeable ; in the fleet- 
ing interviews which compose so much of social inter- 
course, he is distinctly at an advantage who has the 
power of coming to the front at once without wasting 
precious time in preliminaries and reconnaissances. 
Other things being eqmxl, the chances of agreeable con- 
versation at dinner, at the club, or in the pauses of the 
dance are better in the United States than in England. 
The " next man " of the new world is apt to talk better 
and to be wider in his sympathies than the " next man " 
of the old. On the other hand, it seems to me equally 
true that the Americans possess the defects of their 
qualities in this as in other respects ; they are often apt 
to talk too much, they are afraid of a conversational lull, 
and do not sufficiently appreciate the charm of " flashes 
of brilliant silence." It seemed to me that they often 
carried a most unnecessary amount of volubility into 
their business life ; and I sometimes wondered whether 



go The Land of Contrasts 

the greater energy and rush that they apparently put 
into their conduct of affairs were not due to the necessity 
of making up time lost in superfluous chatter. If an 
Englishman has a mile to go to an appointment he will 
take his leisurely twenty minutes to do the distance, and 
then settle his business in two or three dozen sentences ; 
an American is much more likely to devour the ground 
in five minutes, and then spend an hour or more in lively 
conversation not wholly pertinent to the matter in hand. 
The American mind is discursive, open, wide in its 
interests, alive to suggestion, pliant, emotional, imagi- 
native ; the English mind is concentrated, substantial, 
indifferent to the merely relative, matter-of-fact, stiff, 
and inflexible. 

The English have reduced to a fine art the practice of 
a stony impassivity, which on its highest plane is not 
devoid of a certain impressiveness. On ordinary occa- 
sions it is apt to excite either the ire or the anmsement 
of the representatives of a more animated race. I sup- 
pose it is almost impossible for an untra veiled English- 
man to realise the ridiculous side of the Church Parade 
in Hyde Park — as it would appear, say, to a lively girl 
from Baltimore. The parade is a collection of human 
beings, presumably brought together for the sake of see- 
ing and being seen. Yet the obvious aim of each Eng- 
lish item in the crowd is to deprive his features of all 
expression, and to look as if he were absolutely uncon- 
scious that his own party were not the only one on the 
ground. Such vulgarity as the exhibition of the slight- 
est interest in a being to whom he has not been introduced 
would be treason to his dearest traditions. In an Ameri- 
can function of the same kind, the actors take an undis- 



International Misapprehensions 91 

guised interest in each other, while a French or ItaUan 
assemhly would be still more demonstrative. On the 
surface the English attitude is distinctly inhuman ; it 
reminds one that England is still the stronghold of the 
obsolescent institution of caste, that it frankly and even 
brutally asserts the essential inequality of man. No- 
where, perhaps, will you see a bigger and handsomer, 
licalthier, better-groomed, more efficient set of luiman 
animals ; but their straight-ahead, phlegmatic, expres- 
sionless gaze, the want of animated talk, the absence of 
an}'- show of intelligence, emphasises our feeling that 
the}^ are animals. 

The Briton's indifference to criticism is at once his 
streno'th and his weakness. It makes him invincible in 
a cause which has dominated his conscience ; it hinders 
him in the attainment of a luminous discrimination be- 
tween cause and cause. His profound self-confidence, 
his sheer good sense, his dogged persistence, his bull- 
dog courage, his essential honesty of purpose, bring him 
to the goal in spite of the unnecessary obstacles that 
liave been heaped on his path by his own vffpt<; and 
contempt of others. He chooses what is physically the 
shortest line in preference to the line of least resistance. 
He makes up for his want of light by his superiority in 
weight. Social adaptal)ility is not his foible. He accepts 
the conventionality of bis class and w^ears it as an im- 
penetrable armour. Out of his own class he may some- 
times appear less conventional than the American, simply 
because the latter is quick to adopt the manners of a 
new milieu^ while John Bull clings doggedly or uncon- 
sciously to his old conventions. If an American and 
an English shop-girl were simultaneously married to 



92 The Land of Contrasts 

peers of the realm, the odds would be a hundred to one 
in favour of the former in the race for self-identification 
with her new environment. 

The American facility of expression, if I do not err, 
springs largely from an amiable difference in tempera- 
ment. The American is, on the whole, more genially dis- 
posed to all and sundry. I do not say that he is capable 
of truer friendships or of greater sacrifices for a friend 
than the Englishman ; but the window through which 
he looks out on humanity at large has panes of a ruddier 
hue. He cultivates a mildness of tone, which a Briton 
is apt to despise as weakness. His desire to oblige some- 
times impels him to uncharacteristic actions, which lead 
to fallacious generalisations on the part of his British 
critic. He shrinks from any assumption of superiority ; 
he is apt to think twice of the feelings of his inferiors. 
The American tends to consider each stranger he meets 
— at any rate within his own social sphere — as a good 
fellow until he proves himself the contrary ; with the 
Englishman the presumption is rather the other way. 
An Englishman usually excuses this national trait as 
really due to modesty and shyness ; but I fear there is 
in it a very large element of sheer bad manners, and of 
a cowardly fear of compromising one's self with undesir- 
able acquaintances. Englishmen are apt to take omne 
ignotiim pro horriblh\ and their translation of the Latin 
phrase varies from the lifting of tlie aristocratic eyebrow 
over the unwarranted address of the casual companion 
at table d'hote down to the ^' 'ere's a stranger, let's 'eave 
'arf a brick at 'im " of the Black Country. In England 
I am apt to feel painfully what a lame dog T am ; in 
America I feel, well, if I am a lame dog I am l)eing 



International Misapprehensions 93 

helped most delightfully over the conversational stile. 
An Englishman says, ''Would you mind doing so-and-so 
for me ? " showing by the very form of the question that 
he thinks kindness likely to be troublesome. An Amer- 
ican says, " Wouldn't you like to do this for me ? " 
assuming the superior attitude of one who feels that to 
give an opportunity to do a kindness is itself to confer 
a favour. The Continental European shares witli the 
American the merit of having manners on the self-regard- 
ing pattern of noblesse oblige, while the Englishman wants 
to know who i/ou are, so as to put on his best manners 
only if the force majeui^e of your social standing compels 
him. No one wishes the Englishman to express more 
tlian he really feels or to increase the aheady overwhelm- 
ing mass of conventional insincerity ; but it might 
undoubtedly be well for him to consider whether it is 
not his positive duty to drop a little more of the oil of 
human kindness on the wheels of the social machinery, 
and to understand that it is perfectly possible for two 
strangers to speak with and look at each other pleasantly 
without thereby contracting the obligation of eternal 
friendship. Why should an English traveller deem it 
worthy of special record that when calling at a Boston 
club, he found his friend and host not yet arrived, other 
members of the club, unknown to him, had put them- 
selves about to entertain him ? An American gentleman 
would find this too natural to call for remark. 

Whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge 
the fact that our brutal frankness, our brusqueness, and 
our extreme fondness for calling a spade a spade are- 
often extremely disagreeable to our American cousins, 
and make them (temporarily at any rate) feel them- 



94 The Land of Contrasts 

selves to be our superiors in the matter of gentle In-eed- 
ing. As Col. T. W. Higginson has phrased it, they 
tliink that '' the Englisli nation lias truthfulness enougli 
for a whole continent, and almost too much for an 
island." J'liey think that a line might be drawn some- 
wliere between dissembling our love and kicking them 
downstairs. They also object to our use of such terms 
as '^ l)eastly," '' stinking," and ''rot;" and we must 
a(huit that they do so with justice, while we cann(>t 
assoil them altogether of the opposite tendency of a 
prim prudislniess in the avoidance of certain natural 
and necessary words. For myself I unfeignedly admire 
tlie delicacy wliich leads to a certain parsimony in the 
use of words like '^ perspiration," '' cleaning one's self," 
and so on. .And, hoAvever much we may laugh at the 
class that insists u})on the name of ''help" instead of 
"servant," we cannot Imt respect the class which yields 
to the demand and looks with horror on the Englisli 
slang word " slavey." 

On the other hand there are certain little personal 
ha])its, such as the public use of the toothpick, and wliat 
Mr. Moiiey Roberts calls the modern form of Korra^o^^ 
Avhich I think often find themselves in better com- 
pany in America than in England. Still I desire to 
speak here with all due diffidence. I rememl)er wlien I 
pointed out to a Boston girl that an American actor in 
a piece before us, representing high life in London, was 
committing a gross solecism in moistening his pencil in 
his mouth before adding his address to his visiting card, 
she trumped my criticism at once by the information 
that a distinguished Englisli vjournalist, with a handle to 
his name, who recently made a successful lecturing tour 



International Misapprehensions 95 

in the United States, openly and deliberately moistened 
his thumb in the same ingenuous fashion to aid him in 
turning over the leaves of his manuscript. 

A feature of the average middle-class Englishman 
which the American cannot easily understand is his tacit 
i-ecognition of the fact that somebody else (the aristocrat) 
is liis superior. In fact, this is sometimes a fertile source 
of misunderstanding, and it is apt to beget in the Amer- 
ican an entirely false idea of wliat he thinks the innate 
servility of the Englishman. He must remem])er that 
the aristocratic prestige is a growth of centuries, that it 
has come to form part of the atmosphere, that it is often 
accepted as unconsciously as the law of gravitation. 
This is a case where the same attitude in an American 
mind (and, alas, we occasionally see it in American 
i-esidents in London) would betoken an infinitely lower 
moral and mental plane than it does in the Englishman. 
No true American could accept the proposition that 
'' Lord Tom Noddy might do so-and-so, but it would be 
a very different thing for a man in my position ; " and yet 
an Englishman (I regret to say) might speak thus and 
still be a very decent fellow, whom it would be unjust 
cruelty to call a snob. No doubt the English aristocracy 
(as I think Mr. Henry James has said) now occupies a 
heroic position without heroism ; but the glamour of the 
past still shines on their faded escutcheons, and '' the love 
of freedom itself is hardly stronger in England than the 
love of aristocracy." 

Matthew Arnold has pointed out to us how the aristoc- 
racy acts like an inculnis on the middle classes of Great 
Britain, and he has put it on record that he was struck 
with the buoyancy, enjoyment of life, and freedom of 



g6 The Land of Contrasts 

constraint of the corresponding classes in America. In 
England, he says, a man feels that it is the upper claf<.^ 
which represents him ; in the United States he feels that 
it is the State^ i.e.^ himself. In England it is the Bar- 
l)arian alone that dares he indifferent to the opinion of 
his fellows ; in America everyone expresses his opinion 
and ^' voices '' his idiosyncrasies Avith perfect freedom. 
This position has, however, its seamy side. Tliere is in 
America a certain anarchy in qnestions of taste and 
manners which the long possession of a leisnred, a culti- 
vated class tends to save us from in England. I never 
felt so kindly a feeling towards our so-called '^ upper 
class " as when travelling in the United States and 
notiup- some effects of its absence. Tliis class has an 
accepted position in the social hierarchy ; its dicta are 
taken as authoritative on points of etiquette, just as tlie 
clergy are looked on as the official guardians of religious 
and ecclesiastical standards. T do not here pretend to 
discuss the value of the moral example of our jeunesse 
doree^ filtering down through the successive strata of 
society ; but their influence in setting the fashion on 
such points as scrupulous personal cleanliness, the avoid- 
ance of the outre in costume, and the maintenance of an 
honourable and generous standard in their money deal- 
ings witli each other, is distinctly on the side of the hu- 
manities. In America —at least, '* Out West" — every- 
one practically is his own guide, and tlie nouveau rich' 
spends his money strictly in accordance with his own 
standard of taste. The result is often as appalling in 
its hideousness as it is startling in its costliness. On 
the other hand I am bound to state that I have known 
American men of great wealth whose simplicity of type 



International Misapprehensions 97 

could hardly be paralleled in England (except, perchance, 
within the Society of Friends). They do not feel any 
social pressure to imitate the establishment of My Lord 
or His Grace ; and spend their money for what really in- 
terests them without reference to the demands of society. 
It is rather interesting to observe the different forms 
wdiich vulgarity is apt to take in the two countries. In 
England vulgarity is stolid ; in America it is smart and 
aggressive. We are apt, I think, to overestimate tlie 
amount in the latter country because it is so much more 
in voluble evidence. An English vulgarian is often 
hushed into silence by the presence of his social superior ; 
an American vulgarian either recognises none such or 
tries to prove himself as good as you hj being unneces- 
sarily //ro^. This has, at any rate, a manlier air than the 
vulgar obsequiousness of England towards the superior 
on the one hand or its cynical insolence to the inferior 
on the other. The feeling which made a French lady of 
fashion in the seventeenth century dress herself in the 
presence of a footman ^th as much unconcern as if he 
were a piece of furniture still finds its modified analogy 
in England, but scarcely in America. Almost the only 
field in which the Americans struck me as sli owing any- 
thing like servility was in their treatment of such 
mighty potentates as railway conductors, hotel clerks, 
and policemen. Whether, until a millenial golden mean 
is attained, this is better than our English bullying tone 
in the same sphere might be an interesting (juestion for 
casuists. 

Americans can rarely understand the amount of social 
recognition given by English dachesses to such Ameri- 
can visitors as Col. William Cody, generally known as 



gS The Land of Contrasts 

" Buffalo Bill/' They do not reflect that it is just he- 
cause the social gap hetween the two is so irretrievahly 
vast and so universally recognised that the duchesses 
can afford to amuse themselves cursorily with any eccen- 
tricity that offers itself. As Pomona's husband put it, 
people in England are like types with letters at one end 
and can easily l)e sorted out of a state of ''pi," while 
Americans are theoretically all alike, like carpet-tacks. 
Thus Americans of the best class often shun the free 
mixing that takes place in England, because they know 
that the process of redistribution will be neither easy 
nor popular. The intangible sieve thus placed between 
the best and the not-so-good is of a fine discrimination, 
beside which our conventional net-works seem coai-se 
and ineffective. 

Since returning from the United States I have occa- 
sionally been asked how the general tone of morality in 
that country compared Avith that in our own. To 
answer such a question with anything approaching to an 
air of finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme 
presumption. The opinions which one holds depend so 
obviously on a number of contingent and accidental cir- 
cumstances, and must so inevitably be tinged by one's 
personal experiences, that their validity can at best have 
but an approximate and tentative character. In making 
this comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the 
phenomena of mining camps and other phases of life on 
the fringes of American civilisation, which can be fairly 
compared only Avith pioneer life on the extreme 
frontiers of the British Empire. From a similar cause 
we may omit from the comparison a great part of 
the Southern States, Avhere we do not find a homogeneous 



International Misapprehensions 99 

mass of white civiUsation, hut a state of society iiiex- 
pressihly comphcated hy the presence of an inferior race. 
To compare the Southerner with the Englishman we 
should need to ohserve the latter as lie exists in, say, one 
of our African colonies. Speaking, then, with these res- 
ervations, I should feel inclined to say that in domestic 
and social morality the Americans are ahead of us, in 
commercial morality rather behind than before, and in 
political morality distinctly behind. 

Thus, in the first of these fields we find the American 
more good-tempered and good-natured than the English- 
man. Women, cliildren, and animals are treated with 
considerably more kindness. Tlie American translation 
of paterfamilias is not domestic tyrant. Horses are 
driven by the voice rather than by the whip. The 
superior does not thrust his superiority on his inferior 
so l)rutally as we are apt to do. There is a general in- 
tention to make things pleasant — at any rate so long as 
it does not involve the doer in loss. There is less (jra- 
tuitous insolence. Servility, with its attendant hypocrisy 
and deceit, is conspicuously absent ; and the general 
spirit of independence, if sometimes needlessly boorish 
in its manifestations, is at least sturdy and manly. In 
England we are rude to those weaker than ourselves ; 
in America the rudeness is apt to be directed against 
those whom we suspect to be in some way our superior. 
Man is regarded by man rather as an object of interest 
than as an object of suspicion. Charity is very wide- 
spread ; and the idea of a fellow-creature actually suf- 
fering from want of food or shelter is, perhaps, more 
repugnant to the average American than to the aver- 
age Englishman, and more apt to act immediately 



loo The Land of Contrasts 

on his purse-strings. In that which popular hm- 
guage usually means when it speaks of immorality, all 
outward indications point to the greater purity of the 
American. The convereation of the smoking-room is a 
little less apt to be risque ; the possibility of masculine 
continence is more often taken for granted ; solicitation 
on the streets is rare; few American publishers of repute 
dare to issue the semi-prurient style of novel at present 
so rife in England ; the columns of the leading magazines 
are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the 
impi'oper. The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, 
and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means 
so popular, in spite of the general sympathy of American 
taste with French. The statistics of illegitimacy point 
in the same direction, though I admit that this is not 
necessarily a sign of unsophisticated morality. In a 
word, when an Englishman goes to France he feels 
that the moral tone in this respect is more lax than in 
England ; when he goes to America he feels that it is 
more firm. And he will hardly find adequate the 
French explanation, viz.^ that there is not less vice 
but more hypocrisy in the Anglo-Saxon community. 

There is another very important sphere of morality in 
Avhich the general attitude of the United States seems 
to me very appreciably superior to that of England. It 
is that to which St. Paul refers when he says, '' If a man 
will not work, neither shall he eat." American public 
sentiment is distinctly ahead of ours in recognising that 
a life of idleness is wrong in itself, and that the possibil- 
ity of leading such a life acts most prejudicially on char- 
acter. The American answer to the Englishman trying 
to define what he meant by "gentlemen of leisure" 



International Misapprehensions loi 

'' Ah, Ave call them tramps in America '' — is not merely 
a jest, but enshrines a deep ethnical and ethical principle. 
Most Americans would, I think, agree strongly with Mr. 
Bosanquet's philosophical if somewhat cumbersomely 
Avorded definition of legitimate private property, " that 
things should not come miraculously and be unaffected 
by your dealings with them, but that you should be in 
contact with something which in the external world is the 
definite material representative of youi-self " ('' Aspects 
of the Social Problem," p. 31-3). The British gentleman, 
aware that his dinner does not agree with him unless 
he has put forth a certain amount of physical energy, 
reverts to one of the earliest and most primitive forms of 
work, viz.^ hunting. There is a small — a very small — 
class in the United States in the same predicament ; but 
as a rule the worker there is not only more honoured, 
but also works more in accordance with the spirit of 
the age. 

The general attitude of Americans towards militarism 
seems to me also superior to ours ; and one of the keenest 
dreads of the best American citizens during a recent 
wave of jingoism was that of '' the reflex influence of 
militarism upon the national cliaracter, the transforma- 
tion of a peace-loving people into a nation of swaggerers 
ever ready to take offence, prone to create difticulties, 
eager to shed blood, and taking all sorts of occasions to 
bring the Christian religion to shame under pretence of 
vindicating the rights of humanity in some other countrj^" 
The spectacle of a section in the United States apparently 
ready to step down from its pedestal of honourable 
neutrality, and run its head into the ignoble web of 
European complications, was indeed one to make both 



I02 The Land of Contrasts 

gods and mortals weep. But I do not believe it 
expressed the true attitude of the real American people. 
Perhaps the personal element enters too largely into my 
ascription of superior morality to the Americans in this 
matter, because I can never thoroughly enjoy a military 
pageant, no matter how brilliant, for thinking of the 
brutal, animal, inhuman element in our nature of which 
it is, after all, the expression ; military pomp is to me 
merely the surface iridescence of a malarious pool, and 
the honour paid to our life destroyers would, from my 
point of view, be infinitely better bestowed on life pre- 
servei's, such as the noble and intrepid corps of firemen. 
Sympathisers with this view seem much more numerous 
in the United States than in England. ^ 

The judgment of an uncommercial traveller on com- 
mercial morality may well be held as a feather-weight in 
the balance. Such as mine is, it is gathered mainly from 
the tone of casual conversation, from which I should 
conclude that a considerable proportion of Americans 
read a well-known proverb as '* All's fair in love or bnsi- 
ness." Men — I will not say of a high character and 
standing, but men of a standing and character who 
would not have done it in England — told me instances 
of their sharp practices in business, with an evident 
expectation of my admiration for their shrewdness, and 
with no apparent sense of the slightest moral delin- 
quency. Possibly, when the '' rules of the game " are 
universally understood, there is less moral obliquity in 
takinof advantao'e of them than an outsider imaoines. 
The prevalent belief that America is more sedulous in 

^This paragraph was written before the outbreak of the Spanish- American 
war ; but the events of that strufrjile do not seem to me to call lor serioui 
modification of tlic opinion expressed above. 



International Misapprehensions 103 

the worship of the Gohlen Ciilf than any other country 
arises largely, I helieve, from the fact that the chances 
of acquiring wealth are more frequent and easy there 
than elsewhere. Opportunity makes the thief. Anyhow, 
the reproach comes with a bad grace from the natives of 
a country which has in its annals the outbreak of the 
South Sea Bubble, the railway mania of the Hudson 
era, and the revelations of Mr. Hooley. 

Politics enter so slightly into the scope of this book 
that a very few words on the question of political moral- 
ity must suffice. That political corruption exists more 
commonly in the United States than in Great Britain — 
especially in municipal government — may be taken as 
admitted by the most eminent American publicists 
themselves. A very limited degree of intercourse with 
'' professional politicians " yields ample confirmatory 
evidence. Thus, to give but one instance, a wealthy citi- 
zen of one of the largest Eastern towns told me, with 
absolute ingenuousness, how he had " dished " the (say) 
Republican party in a municipal contest, not in the least 
because he had changed his political sympathies, but 
simply because the candidates had refused to accede to 
certain personal demands of his own. He spoke through- 
out the conversation as if it must be perfectly apparent 
to me, as to any intelligent person, that the only possi- 
ble reason for working and voting for a political party 
must be personal interest. I confess this seemed to me 
a very signihcant straw. On the other hand the con- 
clusions usually drawn by stay-at-home English people 
on these admissions is ludicrously in excess of what is" 
warranted by the facts. " To imagine for a moment 
that 60,000,000 of people — better educated than any 



104 The Land of Contrasts 

other nation in the workl — are openly tolerating uni- 
versal corruption in all Federal, State, and municipal 
government is simply assuming that these 60,000,000 
are either criminals or fools." Now, ''you can fool all 
of the people some of the time, and some of the people 
all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of 
the time." A more competent judge ^ than the present 
writer estimates the morals of the American political 
"wire-puller" as about on a level with those of our com- 
pany directors. And before my English readers make 
their final decision on the American political system let 
them study Chapter XL VI. of that very fascinating- 
novel, " The Honorable Peter Stirling," by Paul Leices- 
ter Ford. It may give them some new light on the 
subject of " a government of the average," and show 
them what is meant by the saying, '* The boss who does 
the most things that the people want can do the most 
things that the people don't want." 

We must remember, too, that nothing is hidden from 
general knowledge in America ; every job comes sooner 
or later into the merciless glare of publicity. And if 
our political sins are not the same as theirs, they are 
perhaps equally heinous. Was not the British landlord 
who voted against the repeal of the corn laws, so that 
land might continue to bring in a high rent at the ex- 
pense of the poor man, really acting from just as corrupt 
a motive of self-interest as the American legislator who 
accepts a bribe ? It does not do to be too superior on 
this question. 

We may end. this chapter by a typical instance of the 
way in whicli British opinion of America is apt to l)e 

^ Sir George Campbell, in " Black and White in America." 



International Misapprehensions 105 

formed that comes under my notice at the very moment 
I write these lines. The Daily OJiroyiicle of March 24, 
1896, published a leading article on '' Family Life in 
America," in which it quotes with approval Mme. 
Blanc's assertion that ''the single woman in the United 
States is infinitely superior to her European sister." In 
the same issue of the paper is a letter from Mrs. Fawcett 
relating to a recent very deplorable occurrence in Wash- 
ington, where the daughter of a well-known resident 
shot a coloured boy who was robbing her father's 
orchard. In the Chronicle of ^larcli 25th appears a 
triumphant Britisli letter from " (31d-Fashioned," asking 
satirically whether the habit of using loaded revolvers 
is a proof of the '' infinite superiority " of the American 
girl. Now this estimable gentleman is making the mis- 
take that nine out of ten of his countrymen constantly 
make in swooping down on a single outre instance as 
characteristic of American life. If "Old-Fashioned" 
has not time to pay a visit to America or to read Mr. 
Bryce's book, let him at least accept my assurance that 
the above-mentioned incident seems to the full as ex- 
traordinary to the Bostonian as to the Londoner, and 
that it is just as typical of the habits of the American 
society girl as the action of Miss Madeleine Smith was of 
English girls. 

" Of all the sarse thet I can call to mind, 
England doos make the most onpleasant kind. 
It's you're the sinner oilers, she's the saint ; 
Whofs good's all English, all thet isn't, ain't. 
She is all thet's honest, honnable, an' fair. 
An' when the vartoos died they made her heir." 



VII 



Sports and Amusements 

IN face of the immense sums of money spent on all 
kinds of sport, the size and wealth of the athletic 
associations, the swollen salaries of baseball play- 
ers, the prominence afforded to sporting events in 
the newspapers, the number of " world's records " made 
in the United States, and the tremendous excitement 
over inter-university football matches and international 
yacht-races, it may seem wanton to assert that the love 
of sport is not l)y any means so genuine or so universal 
in the United States as in Great Britain ; and yet I am 
not at all sure that such a statement would not be abso- 
lutely true. By true '' love of sport " I understand the 
enjoyment that arises from either practising or seeing 
others practise some form of skill-demanding amuse- 
ment for its own sake, without question of pecuniary 
profit ; and the true sport lover is not satisfied unless 
the best man wins, whether he be friend or foe. Sport 
ceases to be sport as soon as it is carried on as if it were 
Avar, where " all '' is proverbially " fair." The excite- 
ment of gambling does not seem to me to be fairl}^ cov- 
ered by the phrase " love of sport,'' and no more does 
the mere desire to see one's university, state, or nation 
triumph over someone else's university, state, or nation. 
There are thousands of people who rejoice over or bewail 
the result of the Derby without thereby proving their 

106 



Sports and Amusements 107 

possession of any right to the title of sportsman ; there 
is no difference of qnality between the speculator in grain 
and the speculator in horseflesli and jockeys' nerves. So, 
too, tliere are many thousands who yell for Yale in a foot- 
1)all match who have no real sporting instinct whatever. 
Sport, to be sport, must jealously shun all attempts to 
make it a business ; the more there is of the spirit of j)ro- 
fessionalism in any game or athletic exercise the less it 
deserves to be called a sport. A sport in the true sense 
of the word must be practised for fun or glory, not for 
dollars and cents ; and the desire to win must be very 
strictly subordinated to the sense of honour and fair 
play. The book-making spirit has undoubtedly entered 
far too largely into many of the most characteristic of 
British sports, and T have no desire to palliate or excuse 
our national shortcomings in this or other respects. 
Rut the hard commercial spirit to which I have alluded 
seems to me to pervade American sport much more uni- 
versally than it does the sport of England, and to form 
almost always a much larger factor in the interest 
excited by any contest. 

This is very clearly shown by the Avay in which 
games are carried on at the universities of the two coun- 
tries. Most members of an English college are members 
of some one or other of the various athletic associations 
connected with it, and it cainiot be denied that the gen- 
eral interest in sport is ])oth wide and keen. But it does 
not assume so 'Maisiness-like " an air as it does in such 
a university as Yale or Princeton. Not nearly so much 
money is spent in the paraphernalia of the sport or in 
the process of training. The operation of turning a 
pleasure into a toil is not so consistently carried on. 



io8 The Land of Contrasts 

The memhers of the mtercollegiate team do not obtam 
leave of absence from their college clnties to train and 
practise in some remote corner of England as if they 
were prize-fighters or yearlings. "Gate-money" does 
not bulk so largely in the view ; in fact, admission to 
many of the chief encounters is free. The atmosphere 
of mystery about the doings of the crew or team is not 
so sedulously cultivated. The men do not take defeat 
so hardly, or regard the loss of a match as a serious 
calamity in life. I have the authority of Mr. Caspar W. 
Whitney, the editor of Forest and Stream, and perhaps 
the foremost living writer on sport in the United States, 
for the statement that members of a defeated football 
team in America will sometimes throw themselves on 
their faces on the turf and weep (see his " Sporting Pil- 
grimage," Chapter lA^., pp. 94, 95).^ It was an American 
orator who proposed the toast : " My country — right or 
wrong, my country ; " and there is some reason to fear 
that American college athletes are tempted to adapt this 
in the form " Let us tvin, by fair means or foul." I 
should hesitate to suggest this were it not that the 
evidence on Avhich I do so was supplied from American 
sources. Thus, one American friend of mine told me lie 
heard a member of a leading university football team 
say to one of his colleagues : " You try to knock out 
A. B. this bout; I've been warned once." Tactics of 
this kind are freely alleged against our professional pla}^- 
ers of association football ; but it may safely be asserted 
that no such sentence could issue from the lips of a 
member of the Oxford or Cambridge university teams. 

' T wisli to confess my obli<j:ation to this interesting book for much lielp in 
writing the present chapter. 



Sports and Amusements 109 

Mr. E. J. Brown, Track Captain of the University of 
California, asserted, on his return from a visit to the 
Eastern States, that Harvard was the only P]astern uni- 
versity in which the members of the athletic teams 
were all bond fide students. This is doubtless a very 
exaggerated statement, but it would seem to indicate 
which way the Avind blows. The entire American ten- 
dency is to take amusement too seriously, too stren- 
uously. They do not allow sport to take care of itself. 
" It runs to rhetoric and interviews." All good contest- 
ants become " representatives of the American people." 
One serious effect of tlie way in which tlie necessity of 
wimiing or ''making records " is constantly held up as the 
raison cVetre of atliletic sports is that it suggests to the 
ordinary student, who has no hopes of l)rilliant success 
in athletics, that moderate exercise is contemptible, and. 
tliat he need do nothing to keep up his bodily vigour. 
Thus, Dr. Birkbeck Hill found that the proportion of 
students who took part in some athletic sport was dis- 
tinctly less at Harvard than at Oxford. Nor could T 
ascertain that nearly so large a proportion of the adult 
population themselves played games or followed athletics 
of any kind as in England. I should say, speaking 
roughly, that the end of his university career or his first 
year in responsible business corresponded practically for 
the ordinary American to the forty-fifth year of the 
ordinary Englishman, z.e., after this time he would 
either entirely or partially give up his own active partic- 
ipation in outdoor exercises. Of course there are thou- 
sands of exceptions on l)oth sides ; but tlie general rule 
remains true. Tlie average American professional or 
business man does not play baseball as his English cousin 



no The Land of Contrasts 

does cricket. He goes in his thousands to see hasehall 
matclies, and takes a very keen and vociferous interest in 
their progress ; hut he himself has prohahly not liandled 
a chd) since he left college. No douht this contrast is 
gradually diminishing, and such games as lawn tennis 
and golf have made it practically a vanishing quantity in 
the North-eastern States ; hut as one goes West one can- 
not hut feel that hasehall and other sports, like dancing in 
China, are almost wholly in the hands of paid performers. 
The national games of cricket and baseball serve very 
well to illustrate this, as well as other contrasts in the 
pastimes of the two nations. In cricket the line between 
the amateur and the professional has hitherto been very 
clearly drawn ; and Englishmen are apt to believe that 
there is something elevating in the very nature of the 
game which makes it shed scandals as a duck's back 
sheds water. The American view is, perhaps, rather that 
cricket is so slow a game that there is little scope for 
betting, with all its attendant excitement and evils. 
They point to the fact that the staid city of Philadel- 
phia is the only part of the United States in which 
cricket flourishes ; and, it' in a boasting mood, they may 
claim Avith justice that it has l)een cultivated there in a 
way that shows that it is not lack of ability to shine 
in it that makes most Americans indifferent to the game. 
A first-class match takes three days to play, and even a 
match between two teams of small boys requires a long 
half-holiday. Hence the game is largely practised by the 
members of the leisure class. The grounds on which it 
is played are covered with the greenest and best-kept of 
turf, and are often amid the most lovely surroundings. 
The season at which tlie game is played is summer, so 



Sports and iii.musements 1 1 1 

that looking on is warm and comfortable. There is 
comparatively little chance of serious accident ; and the 
absence of personal contact of player with player re- 
moves the prime cause of quarrelling and ill-feeling. 
Hence ladies feel that they may frequent cricket matches 
in their daintiest summer frocks and without dread of 
witnessing any painful accident or unseemly scuffle. 
The costumes of the players are varied, appropriate, and 
tasteful, and the arrtingement of the fielders is very 
pipteresque. 

^ Baseball, on the other hand (which, 'pace^ my American 
friends, is simply glorified rounders), with the exception 
of school and college teams, is almost wholly practised 
by professional players ; and the place of the county 
cricket matches is taken by the games between the vari- 
ous cities represented in the National League, in wdiich 
the amateur is severely absent. The dress, with a long- 
sleeved semmet appearing below a short-sleeved jersey, 
is very ugly, and gives a sort of ruffianly look to a 
" nine " which it might be free from in another costume. 
The ground is theoretically grass, but practically (often, 
at least) hard-trodden earth or mud. A match is fin- 
ished in about one hour and a half. In running for base 
a player has often to throw himself on his face, and 
thereby covers himself with dust or mud. The specta- 
tors have each paid a sura varying from Is. or 2s. to 8s. 
or even 10s. for admission, and are keenly excited in the 
contest ; while their yells, and hoots, and slangy chaff 
are very different to the decorous applause of the cricket 
field, and rather recall an association football crowd in 
the Midlands. As a rule not much sympathy or courtesy 
is extended to the visitino^ team, and the duties of an 



112 The Land of Contrasts 

umpire are sometimes accompanied by real danger. ^ 
Several features of the play seem distinctly unsports- 
manlike. Thus, it is the regular duty of one of the 
batting team, when not in himself, to try to " rattle " 
the pitclier or fielder by yells and shouts just as he is 
about to " pitch " or " catch " or " touch." It is not con- 
sidered dishonourable for one of the waiting strikers to 
pretend to be the player really at a base and run from base 
to base just outside the real line so as to confuse the 
fielders. On the other hand the game is rapid, full of ex- 
citement and variety, and susceptible of infinite develop- 
ment of skill. The accuracy with which a long field will 
throw to base might turn an English long-leg green with 
envy ; and the way in whicli an expert pitcher will make a 
ball deflect in the ab\ either up or down, to the right or 
left, must be seen to be believed. A really skilful 
pitcher is said to be able to throw a ball in such a way 
that it will go straiglit to within a foot of a tree, turn 
out for the tree, and resume its original course on the 
other side of it ! 

The football match l)etween Yale and Princeton on 
Thanksgiving Day (last Thursday in Noveml)er) may, 
perhaps, be said to hold the place in public estimation in 
America that the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race does 
in England. In spite of the inclement season, spectator 
of either sex turn out in their thousands ; and the scene, 
except that furs are substituted for summer frocks, 
easily stands comparison with the Eton and Harrow day 
at Lord's. The field is surrounded in the same Avay 
with carriages and drags, on which the colours of the 

1 A matcli played in no less aristocratic a place than Newport on Sept. 2, 1897, 
between the local team and a club from Brockton, ended in a fjeneral scrim- 
mage, in which even women joined in the cry of " Kill the umpire ! " 



Sports and Amusements 113 

rival teams are profusely displayed ; and there are the 
same merry coach-top luncheons, the same serried files 
of noisy partisans, and the same general air of festivity, 
while the final toucli is given l)y the fact tliat a brilliant 
sun is not rarer in America in November tlian it is in 
England in June. The American game of football is 
a developed form of the Rugby game ; but is, perhaps, 
not nearer it than baseball is to rounders. It is played 
l)y eleven a side. American judges think that neither 
Rugby nor Association football approaches the Ameri- 
can game either in skill or in demand on the player's 
physical endurance. This may be so ; in fact, so far as 
my very inexpert point of view goes I sliould say that 
it is so. Undoubtedly the American teams go tln^ough 
a much more prolonged and rigid system of training, 
and their scheme of tactics, codes of signals, and sharp 
devices of all kinds are much more complicated. 
" Tackling " is probably reduced to a finer art than in 
England. Mr. Whitney, a most competent and impar- 
tial observer, does not think that our system of " passing " 
would 1)6 possible with American tacklers. Whether all 
this makes a ])etter gaine is a very different question, 
and one tliat I should be disposed to answer in the nega- 
tive. It is a more serious business, just as a duel a 
outrance is a more serious business than a fencing match ; 
but it is not so interesting to look at and does not seem 
to afford the players so much fun. There is little run- 
ning with the ball, almost no dropping or punting, and 
few free kicks. The game between Princeton and Yale 
which I, shivering, saw from the top of a drag in 1891," 
seemed like one prolonged, though rather loose, scrim- 
mage ; and the spectators fairly yelled for joy wlien tliey 



114 ^^^^ Land of Contrasts 

saw the ball, which happened on an average about once 
every ten or fifteen minutes. Americans have to gain 
five yards for every three "downs " or else lose posses- 
sion of the ball ; and hence the field is marked off by 
five-yard lines all the way from goal to goal. American 
writers acknowledge that the English Rugby men are 
juuch better kickers than the American players, and that 
it is now seldom that tlie punter in America gets a fair 
cliance to show his skill. There are many tiresome 
waits in the American game ; and the practice of " inter- 
ference," though certainly managed with wonderful 
skill, can never seem quite fair to one brought up on the 
English notions of " off-side." The concerted cheering 
of the students of each university, led by a regular fugle- 
man, marking time with voice and arms, seems odd to 
the spectator accustomed to the sparse, spontaneous, 
and independent applause of an English crowd. 

An American football player in full armour resembles 
a deep-sea diver or a Roman retiarius more tlian any- 
thing else. The dress itself consists of thickly padded 
knickerbockers, jersey, canvas jacket, very heavy boots, 
and very thick stockings. The player then farther pro- 
tects himself by shin guards, shoulder caps, ankle and 
knee supporters, and wristbands. The apparatus on liis 
liead is fearful and wonderful to behold, including a 
rubber mouthpiece, a nose mask, padded ear guards, and 
a curious headpiece made of steel springs, leather straps, 
and India rubber. It is obvious that a man in this cum- 
bersome attire cannot move so quickly as an Englisli 
player clad simply in jersey, short breeches, boots, and 
stockings ; and I question very much whether — slug- 
ging apart — the American assumption that the science 



Sports mid Amusements 115 

of Yale would simply overwlielin the more elementary 
play of an English university is eritirely justified. Any- 
one who has seen an American team in this curious 
paraphernalia can well understand the shudder of appre- 
hension that shakes an American spectator the first time 
he sees an English team take the field with bare knees. 
Certainly the spirit and temper with which football is 
played in the United States would seem to indicate that 
the over-elaborate way in which it has been handled has 
not been favourable to a true ideal of manly sport. On 
tins point I shall not rely on my own observation, but on 
the statements of Americans themselves, beginning with 
the semi-jocular assertion, which largely belongs to the 
order of true words spoken in jest, that '' in old Englisli 
football you kicked the ball ; in modern English football 
you kick the man when you can't kick the ball ; in 
American football you kick the ball when you can't kick 
the man." In Georgia, Indiana, Nebraska, and possibly 
some other States, bills to prohibit football have actually 
been introduced in the State Legislatures within the past 
few years. The following sentences are taken from an 
article in the Nation (New York), referring to the Har- 
vard and Yale o-ame of 1894: 

o 

The game on Saturday at Springfield between the two 
great teams of Harvard and Yale was by the testimony — 
unanimous, as far as our knowledge goes — of spectators 
and newspapers the most brutal ever witnessed in the 
United States. There are few members of either universit}^ 
— we trust there are none — who have not hung their heads 
for shame in talking over it, or thinking of it. 

In the first place, we respectfully ask the governing body 
of all colleges what they have to say for a game between 



ii6 The Land of Contrasts 

youths presumably engaged in the cultivation of the liberal 
arts which needs among its preliminaries a supply on the 
field of litters and surgeons ? Such preparations are not 
only brutal, but brutalising. How any spectator, especially 
any woman, can witness them without a shudder, so dis- 
tinctly do they recall the duelling field and the prize ring, 
we are unable to understand. But that they are necessary 
and proper under the circumstances the result showed. 
There were actually seven casualties among twenty-two 
men who began the game. This is nearly 33 per cent, of 
the combatants — a larger proportion than among the Fed- 
erals at Cold Harbor (the bloodiest battle of modern times), 
and much larger than at Waterloo or at Gravelotte. What 
has American culture and civilisation to say to this mode 
of training youth ? " Brewer was so badly injured that he 
had to be taken off the field crying with mortification."' 
AVright, captain of the Yale men, jumped on him with both 
knees, breaking his collar bone. Beard was next turned 
over to the doctors. Hallo well had his nose broken. 
JNIurphy was soon badly injured and taken off the field on 
a stretcher unconscious, with concussion of the brain. But- 
terworth, who is said nearly to have lost an eye, soon fol- 
lowed. Add that there was a great deal of " slugging " — 
that is, striking with the fist and kicking — which was not 
punished by the umpires, though two men were ruled out 
for it. 

It may be laid down as a sound rule among civilised 
people that games which may be won by disabling your 
adversary, or Avearing out his strength, or killing him, 
ought to be prohibited, at all events among its youth. 
Swiftness of foot, skill and agility, quickness of sight, and 
cunning of hands, are things to be encouraged in education. 



Sports and Amusements 117 

The use of brute force agaiust an unequally inatclied antag- 
onist, on the other hand, is one of the most debauching 
influences to which a young man can be exposed. The 
hurling of masses of highly trained athletes against one 
another with intent to overcome by mere weight or kicking 
or cuffing, without the possibility of the rigid superintend- 
ence which the referee exercises in the prize ring, cannot 
fail to blunt the sensibilities of young men, stimulate their 
bad passions, and drown their sense of fairness. When 
this is done in the sight of thousands, under the stimulation 
of their frantic cheers and encouragement, and in full view 
of the stretchers which carry their fellows from the field, 
for aught they know disabled for life, how, in the name of 
common sense, does it differ in moral influence from the 
Roman arena ? 

Now, the point in the above notice is that it is 
written of '' gentlemen " — of university men. It is to 
be feared that yevy sindlar charges might be brought 
against some of the professionals of our association 
teams ; but our amateurs are practically exempt fi'om 
any such accusation. The climax of the whole thing is 
the statement by a professor of a well-known university, 
that a captain of one of the great football teams 
declared in a class prayer-meeting '' that the great suc- 
cess of the team the previous season was in his opinion 
due to the fact that among the team and substitutes 
there were so many praying men." The true friends of 
sport in the United States must wish that the foot- 
ball mania may soon disappear in its present form ; and 
the Harvard authorities are to be warmly congratulated 
on the manly stand they have taken against the evil. 
And it is to be devoutly hoped that no president of a 



ii8 The Land of Contrasts 

college ill the future will ever, as one did in 1894, con- 
gratulate his students on the fact '' that their [)rogress 
and success in study during the term just hnished had 
heeiifuUi/ equal to their success in intercollegiate athlet- 
ics and football ! " ^ 

I have, however, no desire to pose as the British 
Pharisee, and I am aware that, though we make the 
better showing in this instance, there are others in 
Avliich our record is at least as bad. The following 
paragraph is taken from the Field (December 7th, 1895) : 

HiGHCLERE. — As various incorrect reports have been 
published of the shooting at Highclere last week, Lord 
(Jarnarvon has desired me to forward the enclosed partic- 
ulars of the game shot on three days : November 26, 
27, and 29, James McCraw (lo, Berkeley-square, w.). 
November 26, Grotti^ (Brooks) Beat, o partridges, 1,160 
pheasants, 42 hares, 2,362 rabbits, 7 various ; total, 3,576. 
November 27, Highclere Wood (Cross) Beat, 5 partridges, 
1,700 pheasants, 1 hare, 1,702 rabbits, 4 woodcock, 16 vari- 
ous ; total, 3,428. November 29, Beeches (Cross) Beat, 6 
partridges, 2,811 pheasants, 969 rabbits, 2 wild fowl, 15 
various ; total, 3,803. Grand total : 16 partridges, 5,671 
pheasants, 43 hares, 5,033 rabbits, 4 woodcock, 2 wild 

' It is, perhaps, only fair to quote on the other side tlic opinion of Mr. 
Rudolf Lelimann, the well-known Ens^lish rowinj; coach, who witnessed the 
match between Harvard and the University of I'cnnsylvania in 1897. He 
writes in the Loudon News: " I have never seen a finer j^anic played with a 
manlier spirit. The quickness and the precision of the players were marvel- 
lous. . . . The game as I saw it, though it was violent and rough, was 
never brutal. Indeed, I cannot hope to sec a finer exhibition of courage, 
strength, and manly endurance, without a trace of meanness." 

And to Mr. Lehmann's voice may be added that of a " Mother of Nine 
Sons," who wrote to the 'Bo:iton Everting Transcript in 1897, speaking warmly 
of the advantages of football in the formation of habits of self- control and sub- 
mission to authority. 



Sports and Amusements 119 

fowl, oS various ; total, 10,807. The shooters on the tirst 
two days were Prince A^ictor Duleep Singh, Prince Fred- 
erick Duleep Singh, Lord de Grey, Lord Ashburton, Lord. 
Carnarvon, and Mr. Chaplin. On Xoveniber 29 Mr. Ruth- 
erford took the place of Mr. Chaplin. 

A little calculation will show that each of the six 
gentlemen mentioned in the paragraph must have killed 
one head of game every minute or two. This makes it 
impossible that there could have been many misses. This 
in turn makes it certain that the pheasants in the bag 
iiiust have been nearly as tame as barndoor fowl. The 
shooting, then, must have been one long drawn-out 
massacre of semi-tame animals, with hardly a breathing 
interval. I confess such a record seems to me as abso- 
lutely devoid of sport and as full of In'utality as the 
woi'st slugging match between Princeton and Yale ; and 
it, moreover, lacks the element of physical courage which 
is certainly necessary in the football match. Besides, the 
English sinners are grown men and members of the class 
which is supposed to set the pattern for the rest of the 
nation ; the university footballers, in spite of tlieir own 
sense of importance, are after all raw youths, to whom 
reason does not altogether forbid us to hope that riper 
years may bring more sense and more true manliness. 

Two of the most popular outdoor amusements in the 
United States are driving and sailing. I do not know 
how far statistics would bear me out, but one certainly 
gets the impression that more people keep horses for 
pleasure in America than in England. Horses are com- 
paratively cheap, and their keep is often lower than with 
us. The light buggies must cost less than the more 



I20 The Land of Contrasts 

substantial carriages of England. Hence, if a man is so 
fond of driving as to be willing to be his own coachman 
and groom, the keeping of a horse and shay is not very 
ruinous, especially in the country or smaller towns. As 
soon as the element of wages enters into the question the 
result is very different : carriage-hire is usually twice as 
high as in England and often more. However that may 
be, it is certainly very striking to see the immense num- 
ber of one-horse " teams " that turn out for an afternoon 
or evening spin in the parks and suburban roads of 
places like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Many of 
these teams are of a plainness, not to say shabbiness, 
whicli would make an English owner too shamefaced to 
exhibit them in public. The fact that the owner is his 
own stableman is often indicated by the ungroomed coat 
of his horse, and by tlie month-old mud on his wheels. 
The horse, however, can generally do a bit of smart trot- 
ting, and his owner evidently enjoys his speed and grit. 
The buggies, unsubstantial as they look, are comfortable 
enough when one is seated ; but the access, between, 
through, and over the wheels, is unpleasantly suggestive 
for the nervous. So fond are the Americans of driving 
that they evidently look upon it as a form of active exer- 
cise for themselves as well as for their nags. One man 
said to me : " I am really getting too stout ; I must 
start a buggy." 

1 am almost ashamed to avow that I spent five years 
in the United States without seeing a trotting-race, 
though this was owing to no lack of desire. The only 
remark that I shall, therefore, venture to make about 
this form of sport is that the American claim that it 
has a more practical bearing tlian the English form of 



sports and Amusements 121 

horse-racing seems justified. It is alleged indeed that 
the English " running " races are of immense impor- 
tance in keeping up the breed of horses ; hut it may well 
he open to question whether the same end could not he 
better attained by very different means. Wliat is gen- 
erally wanted in a horse is draught power and ability to 
trot well and far. It is not clear to the layman that a 
flying machine that can do a mile in a minute and a 
half is the ideal parent for this form of horse. On the 
other hand, the famous trotting-horses of America are 
just the kind of animal that is wanted for the ordinary 
uses of life. Moreover, the trot is the civilised or arti- 
ficial gait as opposed to the wild and natural gallop. 
There are 1,500 trotting-tracks in the United States, 
owned by as many associations, besides those at all county 
and State fairs as well as many private tracks at brood- 
farms and elsewhere. Stakes, purses, and added moneys 
amount to more than $3,000,000 annually ; and the cap- 
ital invested in horses, tracks, stables, farms, etc., is 
enormous. The tracks are level, with start and finish 
directly in front of the grand stand, and are either one 
mile or one-half uiile in length. They are always of 
earth, and are usually elliptical in shape, though the 
'' kite-shaped track " was for a time popular on account of 
its increased speed. In this there is one straight stretch 
of one-third mile, then a wide turn of one-third mile, 
and then a straight run of one-third mile back to the 
start and finish. The horses are driven in two-wheeled 
" sulkies " of little weight, and the handicapping is ex- 
clusively by time-classes. Records of every race are 
kept by two national associations. Horses that have 
never trotted a mile in less than two minutes and forty 



122 The Land of Contrasts 

seconds are in one class ; those that have never l)eaten 
2.35 hi another ; those tliat have never beaten 2.30 in a 
third; and so on down to 2.05, which has been beaten 
but a dozen times. Races are always run in heats, and 
the winner must win three heats. With a dozen entries 
(or even six or eight, the more usual number) a race 
may thus occupy an entire afternoon, and require many 
heats before a decision is reached. Betting is common 
at every meeting, but is not so prominent as at running 
tracks. 

The record for fast trotting is held at present by 
Mr. Morris Jones' mare ''Alix," which trotted a mile 
in two minutes three and three-quarters seconds at 
Galesburg in 1894. Turfmen confidently expect that 
a mile will soon be trotted in two minutes. The two- 
minute mark was attained hi 1897 by a pacing horse. 

Sailing is tremendously popular at all American sea- 
side resorts ; and lolling over tlie ropes of a " cat-boat " 
is another form of active exercise that finds innumerable 
votaries. Rowing is probably practised in the older 
States with as much zest as in Great Britain, and the 
fresh-water facilities are perhaps better. Except as a 
means to an end, how^ever, this mechanical form of sport 
has never appealed to me. The more nearly a man can 
approximate to a triple-expansion engine the better 
oarsman he is ; no machine can ])e imagined that could 
play cricket, golf, or tennis. 

The recent development of golf — perhaps the finest 
of all games — - both in England and America might give 
rise to a whole series of reflections on the curious vicis- 
situdes of sfames and the mvsterious reasons of their 
development. Golf has been played universally in 



Sports and Amusements 123 

Scotland for hundreds of years, riglit under the noses of 
Englishmen ; yet it is just about thirty years ago that 
(except Blackheath) the first golf-club was established 
south of the Tweed, and the present craze for it is of 
the most recent origin (1885 or so). Yet of the eight 
hundred golf-clubs of the United Kingdom about four 
hundred are in England. The Scots of Canada have 
played golf for many years, but the practice of the game 
in the United States may be dated from the establish- 
ment of the St. xVndrew's Club at Yonkers in 1888. 
Since then the game has been taken up with consider- 
able enthusiasm at many centres, and it is estimated that 
there are now at least forty thousand American golfers. 
There is, perhaps, no game that requires more patience 
to acquire satisfactorily than golf, and the preliminary 
steps cannot be gobbled. It is therefore doubtful whether 
the game will ever become extensively popular in a 
countr}^ with so much nervous electricity in the air. I 
heartily wish that this lialf-propbecy may prove utterly 
mistaken, for no better relief to overcharged nerves and 
wearied brains has ever been devised than a well-matched 
" twosome '' or the more social '' foursome ; " and the 
fact that golf gently exercises all the muscles of the 
])ody and can be played at all ages from eight to eighty 
gives it a unique place among outdoor games. The 
skill already attained by the best American players is 
simply marvellous ; and it seems by no means beyond 
the bounds of possibility that tlie open champion of (say) 
tlie year 1902 may not have been trained on American 
soil. The natural impatience of the active-minded 
American makes him at present very apt to neglect the 
eti(piette of the game. The chance of being " driven 



124 The Land of Contrasts 

into " is much hirger on the west side of the Atlantic 
than on the conservative greens of Scotland ; and it 
seems almost impossible to make Brother Jonathan 
"replace that divot." I have seen three different 
parties holing out at the same time on the same putting- 
green. In one open handicap tournament I took part in 
near Boston the scanty supply of caddies was monopo- 
lized by the members of the club holding the tourna- 
ment, and strangers, who had never seen the course, 
were allowed to go round alone and carrying their own 
clubs. On another occasion a friend and myself played 
in a foursome handicap tournament and were informed 
afterwards that the handicaps were yet to be arranged ! 
As the match was decided in our favour it would be 
ungracious to complain of this irregularity. Those little 
infringements of etiquette are, after all, mere details, and 
Avill undoubtedly become less and less frequent ])efore 
the growing knowledge and love of the game. 

Lacrosse, perhaps the most perspicuous and fascin- 
ating of all games to the impartial spectator, is, of 
course, chiefly played in Canada, but there is a Lacrosse 
League in the Atlantic cities of the United States. The 

o 

visitor to Canada should certainly make a point of see- 
ing a good exposition of this most agile and graceful 
game, Avhich is seen at its l)est in Montreal, Toi'onto, or 
Ottawa. Unfortunatel}' it seems to l)e most trying to 
the temper, and I have more than once seen players in 
representative matclies neglect the game to indulge in a 
])Out of angry quarter-staff with their opponents until 
forcibly stopped by the umpires, while the s[)ectators 
also interfere occasionally in the most disgraceful 
manner. An(Uher drawback is tlie interval of ten 



Sports and Amusements 125 

minutes between each game of the match, even when 
the game has taken only two minutes to play. This 
absurd rule has been promptly discarded by the Eng- 
lish Lacrosse Clubs, and should certainly be modified in 
C'anada also. 

Lawn tennis is now played almost everywhere in the 
United States, and its best exponents, such as Larned 
and Wrenn, have attained all but — if not quite — Eng- 
lish championship form. The annual contest for the 
championship of America, held at Newport in August, 
is one of the prettiest sporting scenes on the continent. 
Polo and court tennis also have their headquarters at 
Newport. Hunting, shooting, and fishing are, of course, 
immensely popular (at least the last two) in the United 
States, but lie practically beyond the pale of my experi- 
ence. 

Bowling or ten-pins is a favourite winter amusement 
of both sexes, and occupies a far more exalted position 
than the English skittles. The alleys, attached to most 
gymnasia and atlile tic-club buildings, are often fitted up 
witli great neatness and comfort ; and even the fashiona- 
ble belle does not disdain her '' l)owling-club " evening, 
where she meets a dozen or two of the young men and 
maidens of her acquaintance. Regular meetings take 
place between the teams of various athletic associations, 
records are made and chronicled, and championships 
decided. If the game could be naturalised in England 
under the same conditions as in America, our young 
people would find it a most admirable opportunity 
for healthy exercise in the long dark evenings of 
winter. 

Track athletics (running, jumping, etc.) occupy very 



126 The Land of Contrasts 

much the same position in the United States as in Eng- 
hmd ; and outside the university sphere the same abuses 
of the word ''amateur'' and the same instances of selUng 
prizes and betting prevaiL Mr. Caspar Wliitney says 
that " amateur athletics are absolutely in danger of 
being exterminated in the United States if something is 
not done to cleanse them." The evils are said to be great- 
est in the middle and far West. There are about a score 
of important athletic clubs in fifteen of the largest cities 
of the United States, with a membership of nearly 
25,000 ; and many of these possess handsome club- 
houses, combining the social accommodations of the 
Carlton or Reform with the sporting facilities of 
Queen's. The Country Club is another American insti- 
tution which may be mentioned in this connection. It 
consists of a comfortably and elegantly fitted-up clul)- 
liouse, within easy driving distance of a large city, and 
surrounded by facilities for tennis, racquets, golf, polo, 
baseball, racing, etc. So far it has kept clear of the 
degrading sport of pigeon shooting. 

Training is carried out more thoroughly and consist- 
ently than in England, and many if not most of the 
'' records " are held in America. The visits paid to the 
United States by athletic teams of the L.A.C. and 
Cambridge University opened the eyes of Englishmen 
to what Americans could do, the latter winning seven- 
teen out of twenty events and making several world's 
records. Indeed, there is almost too much of a craze to 
make records, whereas the real sport is to beat a com- 
petitor, not to hang round a course till the weather or 
other conditions make '' record-making " probable. A 
feature of American athletic meetings with which we 



Sports and Amusements 127 

are unfamiliar in England is the short sprinting-races, 
sometimes for as small a distance as fifteen yards. 

Bicycling also is exposed, as a public sport, to the 
same reproaches on both sides of the Atlantic. The bad 
roads of America prevented the spread of wheeling so 
long as the old high bicycle was the type, but the prac- 
tice lias assumed enormous proportions since the in- 
vention of the pneumatic-tired "safety." The League 
of American Wheelmen has done much to improve the 
country roads. The lady's bicycle was invented in the 
United States, and tliere are, perhaps, more lady riders in 
proportion in that country than in any other. As evi- 
dence of the rapidity Avith which things move in America 
it may l)e mentioned that when I quitted Boston in 
1893 not a single "society*' lady so far as I could hear 
had deigned to touch the wheel ; now (1898) I under- 
stand that even a house in Beacon Street and a lot in 
Mt. Auburn Cemetery are not enough to give the guinea- 
stamp of rank unless at least one member of the family 
is an expert wheelwoman. An amazing instance of the 
receptivity and adaptability of the American attitude is 
seen in the fact that the outsides of the tramway-cars 
in at least one Western city are fitted with liooks for 
bicycles, so that the cyclist is saved tlie unpleasant, jolt- 
ing ride over stone pavements before reaching suburban 
joys. 



VIII 
The Humour of the '' Man on the Cars " 

A DIFFERENCE of taste in jokes is a great 
sti'aiii on the affections." So wrote George 
Eliot in '' Daniel Deronda." And the truth 
of the apothegm may account for much of the 
friction in the intercourse of John Bull and Brother 
Jonathan. For, undoubtedly, there is a wide difference 
between the humour of the Englishman and the humour of 
tlie American. John Bull's downrightness appears in 
his jests also. His jokes nuist be unmistakable ; lie 
wants none of your quips masquerading as serious obser- 
vations. A mere twinkle of the eye is not for him a 
sufficient illumination between the serious and the comic. 
'' Those animals are horses," Artemus Ward used to sa}^ 
in showing his panorama. " I know they are — because 
my artist says so. I had the picture two yeare before I 
discovered the fact. The artist came to me about six 
months ago and said, ' It is useless to disguise it from 
you any longer — they are horses. '" ^ This is the 
form of introduction that John Bull prefers for his 
witticisms. He will welcome a joke as hospitably as a 

' In an English issue of Artemus Ward, apparently edited by Mr. John 
Camden Hotten (Chatto and Windus), this passage is accompanied with the 
following gloss : " Here again Artemus called in the aid of pleasant banter 
as the most fitting apology for the atrocious badness of the painting." 

This note is an excellent illustration of English obtuseness — if needed, on 
the part of the reading public; if needless, on the part of the editoi-. 

128 



The Humour of the "Man on the Cars" 129 

visitor, if only the credentials of the one as of the other . 
are unimpeachable. 

Now the American does not wish his joke underlined 
like an urgent parliamentary whip. He wants some- 
thing left to his imagination ; he wants to be tickled by 
tlie feeling that it requires a keen eye to see the point ; 
he may, in a word, like his champagne sweet, but he 
wants his huir.our dry. His telephone girls halloo, but 
Ids jokes don't. In this he resembles the Scotsman 
much more than the Englishman ; and ])oth European 
foreigners and the Americans themselves seem aware of 
this. Thus, Max O'Rell writes : 

De tons les citoyens dii Royaume plus ou moins TJni 
Taini Donald est le plus fini, le plus solide, le plus positif, 
le plus perse verant, le plus laborieux, et le plus spivituel. 

Le plus spirituel ! voila un grand mot de lache. Oui, le 
plus spirituel, n'en deplaise a I'oinbre de Sydney Smith. . . . 
eX'espere bien prouver, par quelques anecdotes, que Donald 
a de Fesprit, de I'esprit de bon aloi, d'humour surtout, de 
cet humour fin subtil, qui passerait a travers la tete iVun, 
Cockney sans y laisser la moiudre trace, sans y faire la 
moindre impression. 

The testimony of tlie American is equally explicit. 

The following dialogue, quoted from memory, appeared 
some time since in one of the best American comic 
journals : 

Tomkyns (of London). — I say, Vanarsdale, I told such a 
good joke, don't you know, to MacPherson, and he didn't 
laugh a bit ! I suppose that's because he's a Scotsman ? 

Vanarsdale (of New York). — I don't know ; I think it's 
more likely that it's because you are an Englishman! 



130 The Land of Contrasts 

An English andience is usually much slower than an 
American or Scottish one to take up a joke that is any- 
thing less than obvious. I heard Max O'Rell deliver one 
of his witty orations in London. The audience was good 
humored, entirely Avith the lecturer, and only too ready 
to laugh. But if his joke was the least hit subtle, the least 
bit less apparent than usual, it was extraordinary how 
the laughter hung fire. There would be an appreciable 
interval of silence ; then, perhaps, a solitary laugh in a 
corner of the gallery ; then a sort of platoon fire in differ- 
ent parts of the house ; and, finally, a simidtaneous roar. 
So, when Mr. John Morley, in his admirable lecture on 
the Carlyle centenary celebration (Dec. 5, 1895), quoted 
Carlyle's saying about Sterling : " We talked about this 
thing and that — except in opinion not disagreeing," 
tliere was a lapse of half-a-minute before the audience 
realised that the saying had a humorous turn. In an 
American audience, and I believe also in a Scottish one, 
the report would have been simultaneous with the flash. 

Perhaps the Americans themselves are just a little too 
sure of their superioritj^ to the English in point of 
humour, and indeed they often carry their witticisms on 
the supposed Englisli '' obtuseness " to a point at wliich 
exaggeration ceases to be funny. It is certainly not 
every American who scoffs at English wit that is enti- 
tled to do so. There are dullards in the United States 
as well as elsewhere ; and nothing can well be more 
ghastly than American humour run into the ground. 
On the other hand their sense of loyalty to humour 
makes them much more free in using it at their own 
expense ; and some of their stories show themselves up 
in the light usually reserved for John Bull. I remem- 



The Humour of the "Man on the Cars" 131 

ber, unpatriotically, telling a stock story (to illustrate 
the English slowness to take a joke) to an American 
writer whose pictures of New England life are as full 
of a delicate sense of humour as they are of real and 
simple pathos. It was, perhaps, the tale of the London 
bookseller who referred to his own coiffure the Ameri- 
can's remark apropos of the two-volume English edition 
of a well-known series of '' Walks in London " — " Ah, 
I see you part your Hare in the middle." Whatever it 
was, my hearer at once capped it by the reply of a 
Boston girl to her narration of the following anecdote : 
\ railway conductor, on his way through the cars to 
collect and check the tickets, noticed a small hair-trunk 
lying in the forbidden central gangway, and told the 
old farmer to whom it apparently belonged that it must 
be moved from there at once. On a second round he 
found the trunk still in the passage, reiterated his 
instructions more emphatically, and passed on without 
listening to the attempted explanations of the farmer. 
On his third round he cried : " Now, T gave you fair 
warning ; here goes ; " and tipped the trinik overl)oard. 
Then, at last, the slow-moving farmer found utterance 
and exclaimed: "All right! the trunk is none o' mine ! " 
To which the Boston girl : " Well, whose trunk was 
it? " We agreed, nem. con.^ that this was indeed Anglis 
ipsis Anglior. 

These remarks as to the comparative merits of English 
and American humour must be understood as referring to 
the average man in each case — the ''Man on the Cars," 
as our cousins have it. It would be a very different 
position, and one hardly tenable, to maintain that the land 
of Mark Twain has produced greater literary humorists 



132 The Land of Contrasts 

than the hind of Charles Lamb. In the matter of comic 
papers it may also he doubted, even ))y those who most 
appreciate American humour, whether England has alto- 
gether the worst of it. It is the fashion in the States to 
speak of "poor old Punchy'' and to affect astonishment 
at seeing in its " senile pages " anything that they have 
to admit to l)e funny. Doubtless a great deal of very 
laborious and vapid jesting goes on in the pages of the 
doyen of English comic weeklies : but at its best Piuich 
is hard to beat, and its humours have often a literary 
quality such as is seldom met with in an American 
journal of the same kind. No American paper can 
even remotely claim to have added so much to the gaiety 
of nations as the pages that can number names like 
Leech and Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold and Tom Hood, 
Burnand and Charles Keene, Du Maurier and Tenniel, 
Linley Sambourne and the author of " Vice Versa," 
among its contributors past and present. And besides — 
and the claim is a proud one — Punch still remains the 
only comic paper of importance that is always a perfect 
gentleman — a gentleman who knows how to behave 
both in the smoking-room and the drawing-room, who 
kn(jws when a jest oversteps the boundary line of coarse- 
ness, who realises that a laugh can sometimes be too 
dearly won. Piui'h is certainly a comic journal of 
which the English have every reason to be proud ; but 
if we had to name the paper most typical of the English 
taste in humour we should, perhaps, be shamefacedly 
compelled to turn to Ally Sloper. 

The best American comic paper is Life^ which is 
modelled on the lines of the MUnchener Fliegende 
Blatter^ perhaps the funniest and most mirth-provoking 



The Humour of the "Man on the Cars'' 133 

of all professedly hiniiorous weeklies. Among the 
most attractive features are the graceful and dignified 
drawings of Mr. Charles Dana Gihson, who has in its 
pages done for American society what INIr. I)u ^laurier 
has done for England hy his scenes in Punch; the 
sketches of F. G. Attwood and S. W. Van Schaick; and 
the clever verses of M. E. W. The dryness, the smart 
exaggeration, the point, tlie unexpectedness of American 
humour are all often admirably represented in its pages ; 
and the faults and foibles of contemporary society are 
touched off with an inimitable delicacy of satire both in 
pencil and pen work. Life, like Punch, has also its 
more serious side ; and, if it has never produced a 
" Song of the Shirt," it earns our warm admiration for 
its steadfast championing of worthy causes, its severe 
and trenchant attacks on rampant evils, and its eloquent 
tributes to men who have deserved well of the country. 
On the other hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes 
the birth of which considerably antedates that of the 
United States itself; and it sometimes descends to a 
level of trifling flatness and vapidity which no Englisli 
paper of the kind can hope to equal. It is hard — for a 
British critic at any rate — to see any perennial interest 
in the long series of highly exaggerated drawings and 
jests referring to the gutter children of New York, 
a series in which the same threadbare motifs are con- 
stantly recurring under the thinnest of disguises. And 
occasionally — very occasionally — there is a touch of 
coarseness in the drawings of Life which suggests the 
worst features of its German prototype rather than any- 
thing it has borrowed from England. 

Among the political comic journals of America men- 



134 'J^l^G Land of Contrasts 

tioii may be made of Puck^ the rough and gaudy car- 
toons of whicli have often what the Germans would call 
a fackende Derhheit of their own that is by no means 
ineffective. Of the other American — as, indeed, of the 
other British — comic papers I prefer to say nothing, 
except that I have often seen them in houses and in 
hands to which they seemed but ill adapted. 

Among the characteristics of American humour — the 
humour of the average man, the average newspaper, tlie 
average play — are its utter irreverence, its droll ex- 
travagance, its dry suggestiveness, its naivete (real or 
apparent), its affectation of seriousness, its fondness for 
antithesis and anti-climax. Mark Twain may stand as 
the high priest of irreverence in American humour, as 
Avitnessed in his " Innocents Abroad " and his '' Yankee 
at the Court of King Arthur."' In this regard the 
humour of our transatlantic cousins cannot wliolly escape 
a charge of debasing the moral currency ])y buffoonery. 
It has no reverence for the awful mysterj^ of death and 
the Great Beyond. An undertaker will place in his 
window a card bearing the words : '' You kick the 
bucket ; we do the rest." A paper will head an account 
of the hanging of three mulattoes with '' Three Choco- 
late Drops." It has no reverence for the names and 
phrases associated with our deepest religious feelings. 
Buckeye's patent filter is advertised as thoroughly relia- 
ble — " being what it was in the beginning, is now, and 
ever shall be." Mr. Boyesen tells of meeting a venera- 
ble clergyman, whose longevity, according to his intro- 
ducer, was due to the fact that " lie was waiting for a 
vacancy in the Trinity." One of the daily bulletins of 
the captain of the large excursion steamer on which I 



The Humour of the ''Man on the Cars'' 135 

visited Alaska read as follows : '^ Tlie Lord only knows 
when it will clear ; and Ite won't tell." And none of 
tlie two Imndred passengers seemed to find anything 
unseemly in this official freedom with the name of their 
Creator. On a British steamer there would almost cer- 
tainly have been some sturdy Puritan to pull down the 
notice. One of the best newspaper accounts of the 
Republican convention tliat nominated Mr. J. G. Blaine 
for President in 1884 began as follows : '' Now a man of 
God, with a bald head, calls the Deity down into the 
7nelee and bids him make tlie candidate the right one 
and induce the people to elect him in November." If I 
here mention the newspaper head-line (apropos of a 
hanging) "Jerked to Jesus," it is mainly to note that 
M. Blouet saw it in 1888 and M. Bourget also purports 
to have seen it in 1894. Surely the American journalist 
has a fatal facility of repetition or — ? 

American humour has no reverence for those in high 
position or authority. An American will say of his chief 
executive, '' Yes, the President has a great deal of taste — 
and all of it l)ad." \ curi-ent piece of doggerel when I 
was in Washington ran thus : 

"Benny runs the White House, 
Levi keeps a bar, 
Johnny runs a Sunday School — 
And, damme, there you are ! " 

The gentlemen named are the then President, ^Nlr. 
Harrison ; the Vice-President, Mr. Morton, who was 
owner or part owner of one of the large Washington 
hotels ; and Mr. Wanamaker, Postmaster General, 
well known as '^ an earnest Christian worker." 



136 The Land of Contrasts 

I have seen even the sacred Declaration of Indepen- 
dence imitated, hoth in wording and in external form, as 
the advertisement of a hotel. 

A story current in Philadelphia refers to Mr. Richard 
Vaux, an eminent citizen and memher of a highly 
respected old Quaker family, avIio in his youth liad been 
an attacks of the American Legation in London. One 
of his letters home narrated with pardonable pride that 
he had danced with the Princess Victoria at a royal ball 
and had found her a very charming partner. His mother 
replied : '' It pleaseth me much, Richard, to hear of tliy 
success at the ball in Buckingham Palace ; but thee 
must remember it would be a great blow to thy father 
to have thee marry out of meeting.'' 

Philosophy, art, and letters receive no greater defer- 
ence at the hands of the American humorist. Even an 
Oliver Wendell Holmes will say of metaphysics that it 
is like " splitting a log ; when you have done, you have 
two more to split." A poster long used by the come- 
dians Crane and Robson represented these popular 
favourites in the guise of the two lowermost cherubs in 
the Sistine Madonna. Bill Nye's assertion that " the 
peculiarity of classical music is that it is so much better 
than it sounds " is typical of a whole battalion of quips. 
Scenery, even when associated Avith poetry, fares no 
better. The advertising fiend who defaces the most 
picturesque rocks with his atrocious announcements is, 
perhaps, hardly entitled to the name of humorist ; but 
the man who affixed the name of Minniegiggle to a small 
fall near the famous Minnehaha evidently thought him- 
self one. So, doubtless, did one of my predecessors in a 
dressing-cabin at Niagara, who had inscribed on its walls : 



The Humour of the ^' Man on the Cars" 137 

" Cannon to right of them, 
Cannon to left of them, 
Cannon in front of them, 
Volleyed and thundered ! 
But the man who desc^nds 
Through the Cave of the Winds 
Can give points to the noble six hundred." 

Of the extravagant exaggeration of American humour 
it is hardly necessary to give examples. This, to the 
ordinary ol)server, has perhaps been always its salient 
feature ; and stock examples will occur to everyone. It 
is easy to see how readily this form of humour can l)e 
abused, and as a matter of fact it is abused daily and 
hourly. Many would-be American humorists fail en- 
tirely to see that exaggeration alone is not necessarily 
funny. 

To illustrate : the story of the woman who described the 
suddenness of the American cyclone bv saying that, as 
she looked up from her gardening, " she saw the air black 
with her intimate friends," seems to me a thoroughly 
humorous application of the exaggeration principle. So, 
too, is the description of a man so terribly thin that he 
never could tell whether he had the stomach-ache or the 
lumbago. But the jester who expects you to laugh at 
the tale of tlie fish that was so large that the water of 
the lake subsided two feet when it was drawn ashore 
simply^ does not know where humour ends and drivel- 
ling idiocy begins. 

The dry suggestiveness of American humour is also a 
well-known feature. In its crudest phase it assumes 
such forms as the following : '' Mrs. William Hankins 
lighted her fire with coal oil on February 23. Her clothes 



1^8 The Land of Contrasts 

fit the present Mrs. Hankius to a T." The orchiiary 
EiigUshman will see the point of a jest like this (though 
his mind will not fly to it with the electric rapidity of 
the American's), but the more delicate forms of this allu- 
sive style of wit will often escape him altogether. Or, 
if he now begins to " jnnip " with an ahnost American 
agility it is because the cleverest witticisms of the 
Detroit Free Press are now constantly served up to him 
in the comic columns of his evening paper. We have 
got the length of being consumers if not producers of 
this style of jest. 

In its higher developments this quality of humour 
melts imperceptibly into irony. This has been culti- 
vated by the Americans with great success — perhaps 
never better than in the columns of that admirable 
weekly journal the Nation. Anyone who cares to search 
the files of about eight or ten years back will find a num- 
ber of ironical leaders, which by their subtlet}^ and wit 
delighted those Avho '' cauglit on," while, on the other 
hand, they often deceived even the elect Americans them- 
selves and provoked a shower of innocently approving 
or depreciatory letters. 

Apart altogether from the specific difference between 
American and English humour we cannot help noticing 
how humour penetrates and gives savour to the loliole of 
American life. There is almost no business too impor- 
tant to be smoothed over with a jest ; and serio-comic 
allusions may crop up amongst the most barren-looking 
reefs of scrip and l)argaining. It is almost impossible to 
imagine a governor of the Bank of England making a 
j(^ke in his official capacity, but wit is perfected in the 
mouth of similar sucklings in New York. Of recent 



The Humour of the "Man on the Cars" 139 

prominent speakers in America all except Carl Sclinrz 
and George William Cnrtis are professed humorists. 

When Professor Boyesen, at an examination in Co- 
lumbia College, set as one of the questions, '' Write an 
account of your life," he found that seventeen out of 
thirty-two responses were in a jocular vein. Fifteen 
of the seventeen students bore names that indicated 
American parentage, while all but three of the non- 
jokers had foreign names. Abraham Jvincoln is, of 
course, the great example of this tendency to introduce 
the element of humour into the graver concerns of 
life ; and his biography narrates many instances of its 
most happy effect. All the newspapers, including the 
religions weeklies, have a comic column. 

The tremendous seriousness with which the English- 
man takes himself and everything else is practically 
unknown in America ; and the ponderous machinery of 
commercial and political life is undoubtedly facilitated 
in its running by the presence of the oil of a sub-con- 
scious humorous intention. The American attitude, 
when not carried too far, seems, perhaps, to suggest a 
truer view of the comparative importance of things ; the 
American seems to say : " This matter is of importance to 
you and for me, but after all it does not concern the 
orbit of a planet and there is no use talking and acting 
as if it did." This sense of humour often saves the 
American in a situation in which the Englishman would 
have recourse to downright brutality ; it unties the 
Gordian knot instead of cutting it. A too strong con-^ 
viction of being in the right often leads to conflicts that 
would be avoided by a more humorous appreciation of 
the relative importance of phenomena. To look on life 



140 



The Land of Contrasts 



as a jest is no doubt a deep of cynicism which is not and 
cannot lead to good, but to recognise the humorous side, 
the humorous possibilities running through most of our 
pi'actical existence, often works as a saving grace. To his 
lack of this grace the Englishman owes mucli of his un- 
popularity with foreigners, much of the difficulty he expe- 
riences in inducing others to take his point of view, even 
when that point of view is right. You may as well hang 
a dog as give him a bad name ; and a sense of humour 
wliich would prevent John Bull from calling a tiling 
" un-English," when he means bad or unpractical, would 
often help him smoothly towards his goal. To his })os- 
session of a keen sense of humour the Yankee owes 
much of his success ; it leads him, with a shrug of Ids 
shoulders, to cease fighting over names when the real 
thing is granted ; it may sometimes lean to a calculating 
selfishness rather than spontaneous generos^ity, but on 
the whole it softens, enriches, and facilitates the prob- 
lems of existence. It may, however, be here noted that 
some observers, such as Professor Boyesen, think that 
there is altogether too much jocularity in American life, 
and claim that the constant presence of the jest and the 
comic anecdote have done much to destroy conversation 
and eloquence. 

Humour also acts as a great safety-valve for the 
excitement of political contests. When I was in New 
York, just before the election of President Harrison in 
1888, two great political processions took place on the 
same day. In the afternoon some thirty thousand Re- 
publicans paraded the streets betw^een lines of amuse<l 
spectators, mostly Democrats. In the evening as many 
Democrats carried their torches through the same tlior- 



The Humour of the '^ Man on the Cars" 141 

oughfares. No collisions of any kind took place ; no ill 
humour was visible. The Republicans seemed to enjoy 
the jokes and squibs and flaunting mottoes of the Demo- 
crats ; and when a Republican banner appeared with 
the legend, '' No frigid North, no torrid South, no tem- 
perate East, no Sackville Went^'' nobody appeared to 
relish it more than the hard-hit Democrat. The Cleve- 
land cry of " Four, four, four years more " was met 
forcibly and effectively with the simple adaptation, 
'' Four, four, four months more," which proved the more 
prophetic of that gentleman's then stay at the White 
House. At midnight, three days later, I was jammed 
in the midst of a yelling crowd in Chestnut Street, 
Philadelphia, watching the electoral returns thrown by 
a stereopticon light, as they arrived, on large white sheets. 
Keener or more interested partisans I never saw ; but at 
the same time T never saw a more good-humored crowd. 
If I encountered one policeman that night that was all 
I did see ; and the police reports next morning, in a 
city of a million inhabitants let loose in the streets on 
a public holiday, reported the arrest of five drunk men 
and one pickpocket ! 

Election bets are often made payable in practical 
jokes instead of in current coin. Thus, after election 
day you will meet a defeated Republican wheeling his 
Democratic friend through the chuckling crowd in a 
wheelbarrow, or walking down the Bond Street of his 
native town with a coal-black African laundress on his 
arm. But in such forms of jesting as in '' White Hat 
Day," at the Stock Exchange of New York, Americans 
come perilously near the Londoner's standard of the 
truly funny. 



142 The Land of Contrasts 

111 comparing American humour with EngUsh we 
must take care that we take chiss for class. Those of 
us who find it difficult to get up a laugli at Judge., or 
Bill Nye, or Josh Billings, have at least to admit that 
they are not quite so feel)le as Ally Sloper and other 
cognate English humorists. When we reach the level of 
Artemus Ward, Ik Marvel, H. C. Bunner, Frank Stock- 
ton, and Mark Twain, we may find that we have no 
equally popular contemporary humorists of equal excel- 
lence ; and these are emphatically humorists of a pure 
American type. If humour of a finer point be demanded 
it seems to me that there are few, if any, living English 
writers who can rival the delicate satiric powers of a 
Henry James or the subtle suggestiveness of Mr. W. D. 
Howells' farces, for an analogy to which we have to look 
to the best French work of the kind. But this takes us 
beyond the scope of this chapter, which deals merely 
with the humour of the "- Man on the Cai^." 



IX 

American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 

THE average British daily newspaper is, periiaps, 
slightly in advance of its average reader ; if 
we could imagine an issue of the Standard^ 
or the Dally Chronicle^ or the Scotsman meta- 
morphosed into human form, we should probably have 
to admit that the being thus created was rather above 
the average man in taste, intelligence, and good feeling. 
Speaking roughly, and making allowances for all obvious 
exceptions, I should be inclined to say that a similar 
statement would not be as universally true of the Amer- 
ican paper and the American public, particularly if the 
female citizen were included under the latter head. If 
the intelligent foreigner were to regard the British citi- 
zen as practically an incarnation of his daily press, 
whether metropolitan or provincial, he would be doing 
him more than justice ; if he were to apply the same 
standard to the American press and the American citi- 
zen, it Avould not be the latter who would profit by the 
assumption. The American paper represents a distinctly 
lower level of life than the English one ; it would often 
seem as if the one catered for the least intelligent class 
of its readers, while the other assumed a standard higher . 
than most of its readers could reach. The cultivated 
American is certainly not so slangy as the paper he 
reads ; he is certainly not keenlj^ interested in the 

143 



144 T^^ Land of Contrasts 

extremely silly social items of which it contains several 
columns. Such journals as the New York Evening Post 
and the Springfield Bepuhlican are undoubtedly worthy 
of mention alongside of our most reputable dailies ; but 
journals of their admirably high standard are compara- 
tively rare, and no cultivated English visitor to the 
United States can have been spared a shock at the con- 
trast between his fastidious and gentlemanly host and the 
general tone of the sheet served up with the matutinal 
liot cakes, or read by him on the cars and at the club. 

Various causes may be suggested for this state of 
affairs. For one thing, the mass of half-educated people 
in the United States — people intelligent enough to take 
a lively interest in all that pertains to humanity, but not 
trained enough to insist on literary /orm — is so immense 
as practically to swamp the cultivated class and render it 
a comparatively unimportant object for the business-like 
editor. In England a standard of taste has been gradu- 
ally evolved, Avhich is insisted on by the educated class 
and largely taken on authority by others. In America 
practically no such standard is recognised ; no one there 
would continue to take in a paper he found dull l)ecause 
the squire and the parson subscribed for it. The Ameri- 
can reader — even when himself of high education and 
refinement — is a much less responsible l)eing than the 
Englishman, and will content himself with a shrug of 
his slioulders where the latter would write a letter of 
indignant protest to the editor. I have more than once 
asked an American friend how he could endure such a 
daily repast of pointless vulgarity, slipshod English, and 
general second-rateness ; but elicited no better answer 
than that one had to see the news, that the editorial 



i 



American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 145 

part of the paper was well done, and that a man 
had to make the best of what existed. This is a 
national trait ; it has simply to be recognised as such. 
Perhaps the fact that there is no metropolitan press in 
America to give tone to the rest of the country may also 
count for something in this connection. The press of 
Washington, the political capital, is distinctly provincial ; 
and the New York papers, though practically represent- 
ative of the United States for the outside world, can 
liardly be said to play a genuinely metropolitan role 
within the country itself. 

The principal characteristics of American journalism 
may be summed up in the word " enterprise." No one 
on earth is more fertile in expedients than an American 
editor, kept constantly to the collar by a sense of compet- 
ing energies all around him. No trouble, or expense, or 
contrivance is spared in the collection of news ; scarcely 
any item of interest is overlooked by the army of alert 
reporters day and night in tlie field. The old-world 
papers do not compete with those of the new in the 
matter of quantity of news. But just liere comes in one 
of the chief faults of the American journal, one of the 
besetting sins of the American people, — their well- 
known love of '' ])igness," their tendency to ask '' How 
much? " rather than '' Of what kind? " There is a lack 
of discrimination in the daily bill of fare served up by 
the American press that cannot but disgust the refined 
and tutored palate. It is only the boor who demands a 
savoury and a roast of equal bulk ; it is only the 
vulgarian who Avishes as mucli of his paper occupied by 
brutal prize-fights or vapid ''i)ers()nals " as l)y important 
political information or literary criticism. There is un- 



146 The Land of Contrasts 

doubtetUy a modicum of truth in Matthew Arnold's sneer 
that American journals certainly supply news enough — 
l)ut it is the news of the servants' hall. It is as if the 
lielm were held rather by the active reporter than by the 
a])le editor. It is said that Avhile there are eight editors 
to one reporter in Denmark, the proportion is exactly 
reversed in the Ignited States. The net of the ordinary 
American editor is at least as indiscriminating as that of 
the German historiographer ; every detail is swept in, irre- 
spective of its intrinsic value. The very end for which 
the newspaper avowedly exists is often defeated by the 
impossibility of finding out what is the important news 
of the day. The reporter prides himself on being able to 
'* write up " the most intrinsically uninteresting and un- 
important matter. The best American critics themselves 
agree on this point. Mr. Howells writes : " There are 
too many things brought togetlier in which the reader can 
and should have no interest. The thousand and one 
petty incidents of the various casualties of life that are 
grouped together in newspaper columns are profitless 
expenditure of money and energy." 

The culminating point of this aimless congeries of 
reading matter, good, bad, and indifferent, is attained in 
the Sunday editions of the larger papers. Nothing 
comes amiss to their endless cokimns : scandal, politics, 
crochet-patterns, bogus interviews, puerile hoaxes, highly 
seasoned police reports, exaggerations of every kind, 
records of miraculous cures, funny stories with comic 
cuts, society paragraphs, gossip about foreign royalties, 
personalities of every description. In fact, they form 
the very I'agbag of journalism. An unreasonable pride 
is taken in their very bulk — as if forty pages per se 



American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 147 

were better than one ; as if the tons of garbage in the 
Sunday issue of the Gotham Gasometer outweighed in 
any valuable sense the ten or twelve small pages 
of the Parisian Temps. Not but that there is a great 
deal of good matter in the Sunda}^ papers. Wer vieles 
bringt wird manehem etums h^ingen ; and he who knows 
where to look for it will generally find some edible morsel 
in the hog-trough. It has been claimed that the Sunday 
papers of America correspond with the cheaper English 
magazines ; and doubtless there is some truth in the 
assertion. The pretty little tale, the interesting note of 
popular science, or the able sketch of some contemporary 
political condition is, however, so hidden away amid a 
mass of feebly illustrated and vulgarly written notes on 
sport, society, criminal reports, and personal interviews 
with the most evanescent of celebrities that one cannot 
but stand aghast at this terrible misuse of the powerful 
engine of the press. It is idle to contend that the news- 
paper, as a business undertaking, must supply this sort 
of thing to meet the demand for it. It is (or ought to 
be) the proud boast of the press that it leads and moulds 
public opinion, and undoubtedly journalism (like the 
theatre) is at least as much the cause as the effect of the 
depravity of public taste. Enterprising stage-managers 
have before now proved that Shakespeare does 7iot spell 
ruin, and there are admirable journals in the United 
States which have shown themselves to be valuable prop- 
erties without undue pandering to the frivolous or 
vicious side of the public instinct.^ 

1 Writing of theatrical managers, the Century (November, 1895) says : 
"One of the greatest obstacles in the way of reform is the inability of these 
same men to discern the trend of intelligent, to say nothing of ciiUivated, 
public opinion, or to inform tlicni^clvcs of the existence of tlie widespread 
craving for higher and better entertainment." 



148 The Land of Contrasts 

A straw shows how the wind hlows ; let one item 
show the unfathomable gulf in questions of tone and 
taste that can subsist between a great American daily 
and its English counterparts. In the summer of 1895 
an issue of one of the richest and most influential of 
American journals — a paper that such men as Mr. 
Cleveland and Mr. McKinley have to take account of — 
published under the heading ^' A Fortunate Find " a 
picture of two girls in bathing dress, talking by the edge 
of the sea. One says to the other: " How did you 
manage your father? I thought he wouldn't let you 
come ? " The answer is : "I caught him kissing the 
typewriter." It is, of course, perfectly inconceivable 
that any reputable British daily could descend to this 
depth of purposeless and odious vulgarity. If this be 
the style of humour desiderated, the Thunderer may 
take as a well-earned compliment the American sneer 
that " no joke appears in the London Times^ save by 
accident." If another instance be wanted, take this : 
Major Calef, of Boston, officiated as marshal at the funeral 
of his friend. Gen. Francis Walker. In so doing he 
caught a cold, of which he died. An evening paper 
hereupon published a cartoon showing Major Oalef 
walking arm in arm with Death at General Walker's 
funeral. 

Americans are also apt to be proud of the number of 
their journals, and will tell you, with evident apprecia- 
tion of the fact, that '^ nearly two thousand daily papers 
and fourteen thousand weeklies are published in the 
United States." Unfortunately the character of their 
h)cal journals does not altogether warrant the inference 
as to American intelligence that you are expected to 



American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 149 

draw. Many of them consist largely of paragraphs such 
as the following, copied verbatim from an issue of the 
Plattsburg Sentinel (September, 1888) : 

George Blanshard, of Champlain, an experienced prescri})- 
tion clerk and a graduate of the Albany School of Pharmacy, 
has accepted a position in Breed's drug-store at Malone. 

Clerk Whitcomb, of the steamer " Maquam," has finished 
his season's work in the boat, and has resumed his studies 
at Burlington. 

1 admit that the interest of the readers of the Se7i- 
tinel in the doings of their friends Mr. Blanshard and Mr. 
Whitcomb is, perhaps, saner and healthier than that of 
the British snob in the fact that '' Prince and Princess 
Christian walked in the gardens of AVindsor Castle and 
afterwards drove out for an airing." But that is the 
utmost that can be said for the propagation of such 
utter vapidities ; and the man who pays his five cents 
for the privilege of reading them can scarcely be said to 
produce a certificate of intelligence in so doing. If the 
exhibition of such intellectual feebleness were the worst 
charge that could be brought against the American 
newspaper, there would be little more to say ; but, alas, 
" there are some among the so-called leading newspapers 
of which the influence is wholly pernicious because of 
the perverted intellectual ability Avith which they are 
conducted." (Prof. Chas. E. Norton, in the Forum^ 
February, 189(3.) 

The levity with which many — perhaps most — Amer- 
ican journals treat subjects of serious importance is 
another unpleasant feature. They will talk of divorces 
as '' matrimonial smash-u[)s,*' ur enumerate them under 



150 The Land of Contrasts 

the caption " Divorce Mill." Murders aiul fatal acci- 
dents are recorded with the same jocosity. Questions 
of international importance are handled as if the main 
purpose of the article was to show the writer's power of 
humour. Serious speeches and even sermons are reported 
in a vein of flippant jocularity. The same trait often 
obtrudes into the review of books of the first importance. 
The traditional " No case — abuse the plaintiff's attorney " 
is translated into " Can't understand or appreciate this — 
let's make fun of it." 

By the Ijest papers — and tliese are steadily multiply- 
ing — the " interview " is looked upon as a serious 
opportunity to obtain in a concise form the views of a 
person of greater or less eminence on subjects on which 
he is entitled to speak with authority. By the majority 
of journals, however, the interview is abused to an inor- 
dinate extent, both as regards the individual and the 
public. It is used as a vehicle for the cheapest forms of 
wit and the most personal attack or laudation. My own 
experience was that the interviewei- put a series of pre- 
arranged questions to me, published those of my answers 
Avhich met his own preconceptions, and invented ap- 
propriate substitutes for those he did not honour with 
his approval. A Chicago reporter made me say that 
English ignorance of America was so dense that " a 
gentleman of considerable attainments asked me if Con- 
necticut was not the capital of Pittslnn-g, and notable 
for its great Mormon temple," — an elaborate combina- 
tion due solely to his own active brain. The same in- 
genuous (and ingenious) youth caused me to invent " an 
erratic young Londoner, who packed his bag and started 
at once for any out-of-the-way country for which a new 



American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 151 

guide-book was published/' Another, with equal lack 
of ground, committed me to the unpatriotic assertion 
that neither in Great Britain nor in au}^ other part of 
Europe was there any scenery to compare with that of 
the United States. But perhaps the unkindest cut of all 
was that of the reporter at Washington who made me 
introduce my remarks by the fatuous expression " Me- 
thought" I Mr. E. A. Freeman was much amused by a 
reporter who said of him : '' When he don't knoAV a thing, 
he says he don't. When he does, he speaks as if he were 
certain of it." Mr. Freeman adds : " To the interviewer 
this way of action seemed a little strange, though he 
clearly approved of the eccentricity." This gentleman's 
mental attitude, like his superiority to grammar, is, un- 
fortunately, characteristic of hundreds of his colleagues 
on the American press. 

The distinction between the editorial and reportorial 
functions of a newspaper are apt to be much less clearly 
defined in the United States than in England. The 
English reporter, as ar rule, confines himself strictly to 
his report, which is made without bias. A Conservative 
speech is as accurately (though perhaps not as lengthily) 
reported in a Liberal paper as in one of its own colour. 
All comment or criticism is reserved for the editorial 
columns. This is by no means the case in America. 
Such an authority as the Atlantic Monthly admits that 
wilful distortion is not infrequent ; the reporter seems 
to consider it as part of his duty to amend the record in 
the interest of his own paper or party. The American 
reporter, in a word, may be more active-minded, more 
original, more amusing, than his English colleague ; but 
he is seldom so accurate. This want of impartiality is 



152 The Land of Contrasts 

another of the patent defects of the American daily 
press. It is a too unscrupulous partisan ; it represents 
the ethics of the ward politician rather than the seeker 
after truth. 

If restraint be a sign of j)ower, then the American 
press is weak indeed. There is no reticence about it. 
Nothing is sacred to an American reporter; everything 
that can be in any sense regarded as an item of news is 
exposed to the full glare of publicity. It has come to 
be so widely taken for granted that one likes to see his 
name in the papers, that it is often difficult to make a 
lady or gentleman of the American press understand 
that you really prefer to have your family affairs left in 
the dusk of private life. The touching little story enti- 
tled " A Thanksgiving Breakfast," in Harper's Maga- 
zine for November, 1895, records an experience that is 
almost a commonplace except as regards the unusually 
thin skin of the victim and the unusual delicacy and 
good feeling of the operator. The writer of an interest- 
ing article in the Outlook (April 25, 1896), an admirable 
weekly paper published in New York, sums it up in a 
sentence : " It is no exaggeration to say that the wanton 
and unrestricted invasion of privacy by the modern 
press constitutes in certain respects the most offensive 
form of tyranny which the world has ever known." The 
writer then narrates the following incident to illustrate 
the length to which this invasion of domestic privacy is 
carried : 

A cultivated and refined woman living in a boarding- 
house was so unfortunate as to awaken the admiration of a 
young man of unbalanced mind who was living under the 
same roof, He paid her attentions which were courteously 



American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 153 

but firmly declined. He wrote her letters which were at 
first acknowledged in the most formal way, and finally ig- 
nored. No woman could have been more circumspect and 
dignified. The young man preserved copies of his own 
letters, introduced the two or three brief and formal notes 
which he had received in reply, made a story of the inci- 
dent, stole the photograph of the woman, enclosed his own 
photograph, mailed the whole matter to a Kew York news- 
paper, and committed suicide. The result was a two or 
three column report of the incident, with portraits of the 
unfortunate woman and the suicide, and an elaborate and 
startling exaggeration of the few inconspicuous, insignifi- 
cant, and colorless facts from which the narrative was 
elaborated. That a refined woman in American society 
should be exposed to such a brutal invasion of her privacy 
as that which was committed in this case reflects upon 
every gentleman in the country. 

No doubt, as the Outlook goes on to show, the American 
people are themselves largely responsible for this atti- 
tude of the press. They have as a whole not only less 
reverence than Euro])eans for the privacy of others, but 
also less resentment for tlie violation of their own privacy. 
The new democracy has resigned itself to the custom of 
living in glass houses and regards the desire to shroud 
one's personal life in mystery as one of the survivals of 
the dark ages. The newspaper personalities are largely 
'' the result of the desperate desire of the new classes, 
to whom democratic institutions have given their first 
chance, to discover the way to live^ in the wide social 
meaning of the word." 

One regrettable result of the way in which the Amer- 
ican papers turn liberty into license is that it actually 



54 



The Land of Contrasts 



deters many people from taking their share in pubhc 
Ufe. The fact that any pnbhc action is snre to bring 
down npon one's head a torrent of abnse or adnhition, 
together with a microscopic investigation of one's most 
intimate affairs, is enough to give pause to all but the 
most resolute. Leading journals go incredible lengths 
in the way they speak of public men. One of the best 
New York dailies dismissed Mr. Bryan as " a wretched, 
rattle-pated boy." Others constantly alluded to Mr. 
Cleveland as " HLs Corpulency." For weeks the New 
York Sun published a portrait of President Hayes with 
the word fraud printed across the forehead. 

Such competent observers as Mr. George W. Smalley 
(^Harper s Magazine^ July, 1898) bear testimony to the 
fact that the irresponsibility of the press has seriously 
diminished its influence for good. Thus he points out 
that "the combined and active support given by the 
American press to the Anglo-American Arbitration 
Treaty weighed as nothing with the Senate." In recent 
mayoralty contests in New York and in Boston, almost 
the whole of the local press carried on vigorous but 
futile campaigns against the successful candidates. 
Several public libraries and reading-rooms have actually 
put some of the leading journals in an Index Expur- 
gatorius.i 

The moral and intellectual defects of the American 
newspaper are reflected in its outward dress. Neither 
the paper nor the printing of a New York or Boston 

iThc so-called ''Yellow Press" has reached such an extreme of extrava- 
gance during the progress of the Spanish- American war that it ma}' be hoped 
that it has at last dug its own grave. On the other hand, many journals were 
perceptibly steadied by having so vital an issue to occupy their columns, and 
the tone of a large section of the press was distinctly creditable. 



American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 155 

daily paper is so good as that of the great Enghsh 
dailies. American editors are apt to claim a good deal 
of credit for the illustrations with which the pages of 
their journals are sprinkled ; but a less justifiable claim 
for approbation Avas surely never filed. In nine cases 
out of ten the wood-cuts in an American paper are an 
insult to one's good taste and sense of propriety, and, 
indeed, form one of the chief reasons for classing the 
American daily press as distinctly lower than that of 
England. The reason of this physical inferiority I do 
not pretend to explain. It is, however, a strange phe- 
nomenon in a country which produces the most beauti- 
ful montlily magazines in the world, and also holds its 
own in the paper, printing, and l)inding of its books. 
But, as Mr. Freeman remarks, tlie magazines and books 
of England and America are merely varieties of the 
same species, while the daily journals of the two 
countries l)elong to totally different orders. Many of 
the better papers are now beginning to give up illustra- 
tions. A l)ill to prevent the insertion in newspapers 
of portraits without the consent of the portrayed was 
even brought before the New York Legislature. An exas- 
perating feature of American newspapers, which seems 
to me to come also under the liead of physical inferiority, 
is the practice of scattering an article over the whole of 
an issue. Thus, on reaching the foot of a column on 
page 1 we are more likely than not to be directed for 
its continuation on page 7 or 8. The reason of this is 
presumably the desire to have all tlie best goods in the 
window; i.e., all the most important head-lines on the 
front page ; but the custom is a most annoying one to 
the reader. 



156 The Land of Contrasts 

It is frequently asserted by Americans that their press 
is very largely controlled by capitalists, and that its 
columns are often venal. On such points as these I 
venture to make no assertion. To prove them would 
require either a special knowledge of the l)ack-h)bbies of 
journalism or so intimate an understanding of the work- 
ing of American institutions and the evolution of Ameri- 
can character as to be able to decide definitely that no 
other explanation can be given of the source of such- 
and-such newspaper actions and attitude. I confine 
myself to criticism on matters such as he who runs may 
read. It is, however, true that, contrary to tlie general 
spirit of the country, such questions as socialism and the 
labour movement seldom receive so fair and sympathetic 
treatment as in the English press. 

So many of the journalists I met in the United States 
were men of high character, intelligence, and bi'eeding 
that it may seem ungracious and exaggerated to say that 
American newspaper men as a class seem to me dis- 
tinctly inferior to the pressmen of Great Britain. But 
I believe this to be the case ; and indeed a study of the 
journals of the two countries would alone warrant the 
inference. The trail of the reporter is over them all. 
Not that I, mindful of the implied practicability of the 
passage of a needle's eye by a camel, believe it impossi- 
l)le for reporters to be gentlemen ; but I do say that it 
is difficult for a reporter on the American system to pre- 
serve to the full that delicacy of respect for the mental 
privacy of others which Ave associate with the idea of 
true gentlemanliness. Mr. Smalley, in a passage con- 
troverting the general opinion that a journalist should 
always l)egin at the lowest rung of the ladder, admits 



American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 157 

that a modern reporter has often to approach people in a 
waj that he will find it hard to reconcile with his own 
self-respect or the dignity of his profession. The repre- 
sentative of the press whom one meets in English society 
and clubs is very apt to be a university graduate, dis- 
tinguished from his academic colleagues, if at all, by his 
superior ability and address. This is also true of many 
of the editorial writers of large American journals ; but 
side by side with these will be found a large number of 
men wlio have worked their way up from the pettiest 
kind of reporting, and who have not had the advantage, 
at the most impressionable period of their career, of 
associating with the best-mannered men of the time. It 
is, of course, highly honourable to American society and 
to themselves that they have and take the opportunity 
of advancement, but the fact remains patent in their 
slip-shod style and the faulty grammar of their writings, 
and in their vulgar familiarity of manner. It has been 
asserted that journalism in America is not a profession, 
and is " subject to none of the conditions that would 
entitle it to the name. There are no recognised rules 
of conduct for its members, and no tribunal to enforce 
them if there were.'' 

The startling contrasts in America which suggested 
the title of the present volume are, of course, well in 
evidence in the American press. Not only are there 
many papers which are eminently unobnoxious to the 
charges brought against the American press generally, 
but different parts of the same paper often seem as if 
they were products of totally different spheres (or, at 
any rate, hemispheres). The '' editorials," or leaders, 
are sometimes couched in a form of which the scholarly 



158 The Land of Contrasts 

restraint, chasteness of style, moral dignity, and intel- 
lectual force would do honour to the best possible of 
papers in the best possible of worlds, while several col- 
umns on the front page of the same issue are occupied by 
an illustrated account of a prize-fight, in which the most 
pointless and disgusting slang, such as ''tapping his 
claret " and " bunging his peepers,'' is used with blood- 
curdling frequency. 

In a paper that lies before me as I write, something 
like a dozen columns are devoted to a detailed account 
of the great contest between John L. Sullivan and Jim 
Corbett (Sept. T, 1892), Avhile the })rincipal place on 
the editorial page (l)ut only one column) is occupied by 
a well-written and most appreciative article on the 
Quaker poet Whittier, Avho had gone to his long home 
just about the time the pugilists were battering each 
other at New Orleans.^ 

It would give a false impression of American journal- 
ism as a whole if we left the question liere. While 
American newspapers certainly exemplify many of the 
Avorst sides of democracy and much of the rawness of a 
new country, it would be folly to deny that they also 
participate in the attendant virtues of both the one and 
the other. The same inspiring sense of largeness and 
freedom that we meet in other American institutions is 
also represented in the press : the same absence of 
slavish deference to effete authority, the same openness 
of opportunity, the same freshness of outlook, the same 
spontaneity of expression, the same readiness in windbag- 

1 It may be doubted, however, whether any American author of similar 
standing Avould devote a chapter to the loathsome details of the prize-ring, as 
Mr. George Meredith does in his novel "The Amazing Marriage." 



American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing 159 

piercing, the same admiration for talent in whatever field 
displayed. The time-honoured alliance of dulness and 
respectability has had its decree nisi from the American 
press. Several of our own journalists have had the wit to 
see and the energy to adopt the best feature of the Amer- 
ican style ; and the result has been a distinct advance in 
the raciness and readableness of some of our best-known 
journals. The " Americanisation of the British press " 
is no bugbear to stand in awe of, if only it be carried on 
with good sense and discrimination. We can most 
advantageously exchange lessons of sobriety and re- 
straint for suggestions of candour, humour, and point ; 
and America's share in the form of the ideal English 
reading journal of the future will possibly not l)e the 
smaller. 

The Nation^ a political and literary Aveekly, and the 
religious or semi-religious weekly journals like the Out- 
looJc and the Independent^ are superior to anything we 
have in the same genre ; and the high-water mark even 
of the daily political press, though not very often attained, 
is perhaps almost on a level with the best in Europe. 
Richard Grant White found a richness in the English 
papers, due to the far-reaching interests of the Britisli 
empire, which made all other journalism seem tame and 
narrow ; but perhaps he would nowadays hesitate to 
attach this stigma to the best journals of New York. 
And, in conclusion, we must not forget that American 
papers have often lent all their energies to the champion- 
ship of noble causes, ranging from the enthusiastic anti- 
slavery agitation of the New York Tribune^ under Plorace 
Greeley, down to the crusade against body-snatching, suc- 
cessfull}^ carried on by the Press of Philadelphia, and to 



i6o The Land of Contrasts 

the agitation in favour of the horses of tlie Fifth-avenue 
stages so pertinaciously fomented by the humorous jour- 
nal Life. 

I cannot resist the temptation of printing ])aTt of a notice 
of " Baedeker's Handbook to the United States,"' which will 
show the almost incredible lengths to which the less cult- 
ured scribes of the American press carry their " spread- 
eagleism " even now. It is from a journal published in a 
city of nearly 100,000 inhabitants, the capital (though not 
the largest city) of one of the most important States in the 
Union. It is headed ^' A Blind Guide : '* 

It is simply inei)ini)rc4iensible that an author of so much lit- 
erary merit in his preparation of guides to European countries 
should make the absohite failure that he has in the buikling of a 
o-uide to the United States intended for European travellers. As 
a o-uide, it is a monstrosity, fully as deceptive and misleading in 
its aims as it is ridiculous and unworthy in its criticisms of our 
people, our customs and liabitations. It is not a guide in any 
sense, but a general tirade of abuse of Americans and their 
country; a compilation of mean, unfair statements; of presumed 
facts tiiat are a tissue of transparent falsehoods ; of comparisons 
with Europe and Europeans that are odius {sic). Baedeker sees 
very little to commend in America, but a great deal to criticise, 
and warns Europeans coming to this country that they must use 
discretion if they expect to escape the machinations of our people 
and the snares with which they will be surrounded. Any person 
who has ever travelled in Europe and America will concede that 
in the United States the tourist enjoys better advantages in every 
way than he can in Europe. Our hotels possess by far bettei- 
accommodations, and none of that " flunkeyism " which causes 
Americans to smile as they witness it on arrival. Our railway 
service is superior in every respect to that of Europe. As regards 
civility to strangers the Americans are unequalled on the face of 
the globe. In antiquity Europe excels ; but in natural picturesque 
scenery the majestic grandeur of our West is so far ahead of 



American Journalism — A Mixed Blessing i6i 

anything to be seen in Europe, even in beautiful Switzerland, 
that the alien beholder cannot but express wonder and admira- 
tion. Baedeker has made a mistake in his attempt to underrate 
America and Americans, its institutions and their customs. True, 
our nation is in a crude state as compared with the old monarchies 
of Europe, but in enterprise, business qualifications, politeness, 
literary and scientific attainments, and in fact all the essential 
(pialities that tend to constitute a people and a country, America 
is away in the advance of staid, old foggy (sic) Europe, and 
Baedeker will find much difficulty to eradicate that all-iraj^ortant 
fact. 

I hasten to assure my Englisli readers that this is no fair 
sample of transatlantic journalism, and that nine out of ten 
of my American acquaintances would deem it as nnique a 
literary specimen as they wT)uhl. At the same time I may 
remind my American readers that the scutcheon of Ameri- 
can journalism is not so bright as it might be while 
blots of this kind occur on it, and that it is the blatancy 
of Americans of this type that tends to give currency 
to the distorted opinion of XTncle Sam that prevails so 
widely in Europe. 

Perhaps I shall not be misunderstood if I say that this 
review is by no means typical of the notice taken by 
American journals of " Baedeker's Handbook to the United 
States.'' Whatever other defects were found in it, review- 
ers were almost unanimous in pronouncing it fair and 
free from prejudice. Indeed, the reception of the Hand- 
book by the American press was so much more friendly 
than I had any right to expect that it has made me feel 
some qualms in writing this chapter of criticism, while it 
must certainly relieve me of any possible charge of a wish 
to retaliate. 



X 

Some Literary Straws 

BY far the most popular novel of the London season 
of 1894 was ^^ The Manxman," by Mr. Hall 
Caine. Its sale is said to have reached a fah- 
nlous nnmber of thousands of copies, and the 
testimony of the pnl)lic press and the circulating library 
is unanimous as to the supremacy of its vogue. In tlie 
United States the favourite book of the year was Mr. 
George Du Maurier's '• Trill)y." To the practical and 
prosaic evidence of the eager purchase of half a million 
copies we have to add the more romantic liomage of the 
new Western towns (Trilby ville !) and patent bug 
exterminators named after the heroine. It may, possi- 
bly, be worth while examining the predominant qualities 
of the two books with a view to ascertain what light 
their similarities and differences may thi-ow upon the 
respective literary tastes of the Englishman and the 
American. 

There has, I believe, been no important critical denial 
of the right of '' The Manxman '' to rank as a " strong " 
book. The plot is drawn with consummate skill — not 
in the sense of a Gaboriau-like unravelment of mystery, 
but in its organic, natural, inevitable development, and 
in the abiding interest of its evolution. The details are 
worked in with the most scrupulous care. Rarely, iu 

162 



Some Literary Straws 163 

modern fiction, have certain elemental features of the 
human being been displayed with more determination 
and pathos. 

The central motif of the story — the corrosion of a 
predominantly righteous soul by a repented but hidden 
sin culminating in an overwhelming necessity of con- 
fession — is so powerfully presented to us that we forget 
all question of originality until our memory of the 
fascinating pages has cooled down. Then we may 
recall the resemblance of theme in the recent novel 
entitled '' The Silence of Dean Maitland," ivhile we find 
the prototype of both these books in *' The Scarlet 
Letter " of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has handled the 
problem Avith a subtlety and haunting weirdness to 
which neither of the English works can lay any claim. 
As our first interest in the story farther cools, it may 
occur to us that the very perfection of plot in '' Tlie 
Manxman " gives it the effect of a "set piece ;" its asso- 
ciation Avith Mr. Wilson Barrett and the boards seems 
foreordained. It may seem to us that there is a little 
forcing of the pathos, that a certain artificiality pervades 
the scene. In a word, we may set down " The Manx- 
man " as melodrama — melodrama at its best, but still 
melodrama. Its effects are vivid, positive, sensational ; 
its analysis of character is keen, but hardly subtle ; it 
appeals to the British public's love of the obvious, the 
full-blooded, the thorough-going ; it runs on well-tried 
lines ; it is admirable, but it is not new. 

" Trilby " is a very different book, and it would be a 
catholic palate indeed that would relish equally the 
story of the Paris grisette and the story of the Manx 
deemster. In " Trilby " the blending of the novel and 



164 The Land of Contrasts 



the romance, of the real and the fantastic, is as much of 
a stumbling-block to John Bull as it is, for example, in 
Ibsen's " Lady from the Sea." " The central idea," he 
might exclaim, '' is utterly extravagant ; the transforma- 
tion by hypnotism of the absolutely tone-deaf girl into 
the unutterably peerless singer is unthinkable and 
absurd." The admirers of "Trilby" may very well 
grant this, and yet feel that their withers are unwrung. 
It is not in the hypnotic device and its working out that 
they find the charm of the story ; it is not the plot that 
they are mainly interested in ; it is not even the 
slightly sentimental love-story of Trilby and Little 
Billee. They are willing to let the whole framework, 
as it were, of the book go by the board ; it is not the 
thread of the narrative, but the sketches and incidents 
strung on it, that appeals to them. They revel in the 
fascinating novelty and ingenuousness of the Du Man- 
ner vein, the art that is superficially so artless, the 
exquisitely simple delicacy of touch, the inimitable fine- 
ness of characterisation, the constant suggestion of the 
tender and true, the keen sense of the pathetic in life 
and the humour that makes it tolerable, the lovable 
drollery that corrects the tendency to the sentimental, 
the subtle blending of the strength of a man with the 
naivete of the child, the ambidextrous familiarity with 
English and French life, the kindliness of the satire, 
the absence of all straining for effect, the deep humanity 
that pervades the book from cover to cover. 

If, therefore, we take '' The Manxman " and "• Trilby " 
as types of what specially appeals to the reading pu])lic 
of England and America, we should conclude that the 
Eng^lishman calls for strength and directness, the Amer- 



Some Literary Straws 165 

ican for delicacy and siiggestiveness. The former does 
not insist so much on originality of theme, if the liand- 
ling be but new and clever ; there are certain elementary 
passions and dramatic situations of which the British 
public never wearies. The American does not clamour 
for telling " curtains," if the character-drawing be keen, 
the conversations fresh, sparkling, and humorous. John 
Bull likes vividness and solidity of impasto ; Jonathan's 
eye is often more pleasantly affected by a delicate grada- 
tion of half-tones. The one desires the downright, the 
concrete, the real ; the other is titillated by the subtle, the 
allusive, the half-spoken. The antithesis is between /orce 
and finesse^ between the palpable and the impalpable.^ 

If anybody but George Du Maurier could have written 
*' Trilby," it seems to me it would have been an Amer- 
ican rather than a full-blooded Englishman. The keen- 
ness of the American appreciation of the book corresponds 
to elements in the American nature. The Anglo-French 
blend of Mr. Du Manner's literary genius finds nearer 
analogues in American literature than in either English 
or French. 

II confess I should have felt myself on still firmer ground in making the 
above comparison if I had been able to select ''Peter Ibbetson" instead of 
"Trilby" as the American favourite. It is distinctly the finest, the most char- 
acteristic, and the most convincing of Mr. Du Manner's novels, though it is 
easy to see why it did not enjoy such a " boom " as its successor. In " Peter 
Ibbetson " our moral sense does not feel outiaged by the fact of the sympathy 
we have to extend to a man-slayer ; we are made to feel that a man may kill 
his fellow in a moment of ungovernable and not unrighteous wrath Avithout 
losing his fundamental goodness. On the other hand, it seems to me, Mr. Du 
Maurier fails to convert us to belief in the possil)ility of such a character as 
Trilby, and fails to make us wholly sympathise with his pjcans in her praise. It 
seems psychologically impossible for a woman to sin so repeatedly as Trilby, 
and so apparently without any overwhelming temptation, and yet at the same 
time to retain her essential purity. It is a prostitution of the word " love " to 
excuse Trilby's temporary amourettes with a " quia multum amavit." 



1 66 The Land of Contrasts 

The hest Avritiiig of our American cousins has, of 
course, much that it shares with our own, much that is 
purely English in source and inspiration. Longfellow, 
for instance, might almost have been an Englishman, and 
his great popularity in England probably owed nothing 
to the attraction exercised by the unfamiliar. The Eng- 
lish traits, moreover, are often readily discernible even in 
those works that smack most of the soil. When, however, 
we seek the differentiating marks of American literature, 
we find that many of them are also characteristics of 
the writings of ^Ir. Du Maurier, wliile they are much less 
conspicuous in those of Mr. Hall Caine. Among such 
marks are its freshness and spontaneity, untrammelled 
by authorit}^ or tradition ; its courage in tackling prob- 
lems elsewhere tabooed ; its breezy intrepidity, rooted 
half in conscious will and half in naive ignorance. Be- 
sides these, we find features that we should hardly have 
expected on a priori grounds. A wideness of sweep and 
elemental greatness in proportion to the natural majesty 
of the huge new continent are hardly present; Walt 
Whitman remains an isolated phenomenon. Instead, we 
meet in the best American literature an almost aristo- 
cratic daintiness and feeling for the refined and select. 
As compared with the British school, the leading Amer- 
ican school is marked by an increased delicacy of finesse^ 
a tendency to refine and refine, a perhaps exaggerated 
dread of the platitude and the commonplace, a fondness 
for analysis, a preference for character over event, an 
avoidance of absolutely untempered seriousness and 
solidity. Mr. Bryce notes that the verdicts of the best 
literary circles of the United States often seem to "pro- 
ceed from a more delicate and sympathetic insight *' than 
ours. 



Some Literary Straws 167 

This fastidiousness of the best writers and critics of 
America is by no means inconsistent with the existence 
of an enormous class of half-educated readers, who 
devour the kind of "literature " provided for them, and 
batten in their various degrees on the productions of 
Mr. E. P. Roe, Miss Laura Jean Libbey, or the San- 
day War- Whoop. The evolution of democracy in the 
literary sphere is exactly analogous to its course in the 
political sphere. In both there is the same tendency to 
go too far, to overturn the good and legitimate authority 
as well as the bad and oppressive ; both are apt, to use 
the homely German proverb, " to throw the baby out of 
the bath along with the dirty water." This lack of dis- 
crimination leads to the rushing in of fools where angels 
might well fear to tread. All sorts of men try to write 
books, and all sorts of men think they are able to judge 
them. The old standard of authority is overthrown, and 
for a time no other takes its place with the great mass of 
the reading public. This state of affairs is, however, by 
no means one that need make us despair of the literary 
future of America. It reminds me of the mental con- 
dition of a kindly American tourist who once called at 
our oflice in Leipsic to give us the benefit of the correc- 
tions he had made on " Baedeker's Handbooks " during 
his peregrination of Europe. "Here," he said, "is one 
error which I am absolutely sure of : you call tliis a 
statue of Minerva ; but I know that's wrong, because I 
saw Pallas carved on the pedestal ! " When I told this 
tale to English friends, they saw in it nothing but a 
proof of the colossal ignorance of the travelling Amer- 
ican. To my mind, however, it redounded more to the 
credit of America than to its discredit. It showed that 



1 68 The Land of Contrasts 

Americans of defective education felt the need of cult- 
ure and spared no pains to procure it. A London 
tradesman with the education of my American friend 
would probably never extend his ideas of travelling be- 
yond Margate, or at most a week's excursion to " Parry." 
But this indefatigable tourist had visited all the chief 
galleries of Europe, and bad doubtless greatly improved 
his taste in art and educated his sense of the refined and 
beautiful, even though his book-learning had not taught 
him that the same goddess might have two different 
names. 

The application of this anecdote to the present condi- 
tion of American literature is obvious. The great fact 
is that there is an enormous crowd of readers, and the 
great hope is that they will eventually work their way 
up through Miss Laura Jean Libbey to heights of purer 
air. America has not so much degraded a previously 
existing literary palate as given a taste of some sort to 
those who under old-world conditions might never have 
come to it. In American literature as in American life 
we find all the phenomena of a transition period — all 
the symptoms that might be expected from the extraordi- 
nary mixture of the old and the new, the childlike and 
the knowing, the past and the present, in this Land of 
Contrasts. The startling difference between the best 
and the worst writers is often reflected in different 
works by the same author ; or a real and strong natural 
talent for writing will be found conjoined with an ex- 
traordinary lack of education and training. An excel- 
lent piece of English — pithy, forcible, and even elegant 
■ — will often shatter on some simple grammatical reef, 
such as the use of " as " for '' that " (" he did not know 



Some Literary Straws 169 

as lie could "), or of the plural for the singular ('' a long 
ways off "). Mr. James Lane Allen, the author of a series 
of refined and delicately worded romances, can write 
such phrases as ''In a voice neither could scarce hear" 
and '^ Shake hands with me and tell me good-by." 
("The Choir Invisible," pp. 222, 297.) 

I know not whether the phrase "was graduated," 
applied not to a vernier, but to a student, be legitimate 
or not ; it is certainly so used by the best American 
writers. Another common American idiom that sounds 
queer to British ears is, " The minutes were ordered 
printed " (for " to be printed"). Misquotations and mis- 
use of foreign phrases are terribly rife ; and even so 
spirited and entertaining a writer as Miss F. C. Baylor 
will write : " This Jenny, with the esprit de Vesealier 
of her sex, had at once divined and resented " (" On 
Both Sides," p. 26). In the same way one is constantly 
appalled in conversation by hearing college graduates 
say " acrost " for " across " and making other " bad 
breaks " which in England could not be conjoined with 
an equal amount of culture and education. 

The extreme fastidiousness and delicacy of the lead- 
ing American writers, as above referred to, may be to a 
large extent accounted for by an inevitable reaction 
against the general tendency to the careless and the 
slipshod, and is thus in its way as significant and natural 
a result of existing conditions as any other feature of 
American literature. Perhaps a secondary cause of this 
type of writing may be looked for in the fact that so far 
the spirit of New England has dominated American liter- 
ature. Even those writers of the South and West who 
are freshest in their material and vehicle are still perme- 



i^o The Land of Contrasts 

ated by the tone, the temper, the method, the ideals, of 
the New Enghiiid schooh And certainly xVllibone's 
dictionary of anthors shows that an enormous propor- 
tion of American writers are to this day of New 
England origin or descent. 

Among living American writers the two whose names 
occur most sp(mtaneously to the mind as typical exam- 
ples are, perhaps, Henry James and W. D. Howells. 
Of these the former has identified himself so much witli 
European life and has devoted himself so largely to 
European subjects that we, perhaps, miss to some 
extent the American atmosphere in his works, though 
he undoubtedly possesses the American quality of work- 
manship in a very high degree. Or, to put it in another 
way, his touch is indisputably American, while his acces- 
sories, his staffage, are cosmopolitan. His American 
hand has become dyed to that it works in. This, how- 
ever, is more true of his later than of his earlier works. 
That imperishable little classic " Daisy Miller " is a very 
exquisite and typical specimen of the American suggest- 
iveness of style ; indeed, as I have hinted (Chapter IV.), 
its suggestiveness almost overshot the mark and re- 
quired the explanation of a dramatic key. His dislike 
of the obvious and the commonplace sometimes leads 
Mr. James to become artificial and even obscure,^ but at 
its best his style is as perspicuous as it is distinguished, 
dainty, and subtle ; there is, perhaps, no other living 
artist in words who can give his admirers so rare a liter- 
ary pleasure in mere exquisiteness of workmanship. 

1 His extraordinary article on Georg-e Dii Maurier in Harper's Magazine for 
September, 1897, is, perhaps, so for as style is concerned, as jjlaring an exam- 
ple of how not to do it as can be found in the range of American letters. 



Some Literary Straws 171 

Mr. Howells, unlike Mr. James, is purely and exclu- 
sively American, in his style as in his subject, in his 
main themes as in his incidental illustrations, in his 
spirit, his temperament, his point of view. No one has 
written more pleasantly of Venice ; but just as surely 
there is a something in his Venetian sketches which no 
one but an American could have put there. Mr. James 
may be as patriotic a citizen of the Great Republic, but 
there is not so much tangible evidence of the fact in his 
writings ; Mr. Howells may be as cosmopolitan in his 
sympathies as Mr. James, but his writings alone Avould 
hardly justify the inference. Mr. Howells also possesses 
a honJio77iie, a geniality, a good-nature veiled by a slight 
mask of cynicism, that ma}^ be personal, but which 
strikes one as also a characteristic American trait. Mr. 
James is not, I hasten to say, the reverse of this, but he 
shows a coolness in his treatment, a lordly indifference 
to the fate of his creations, an almost pitiless keenness 
of analysis, which savovir a little more of an end-of-the- 
century European than of a young and genial democ- 
racy. 

Mr. Howells is, perhaps, not always so well appreci- 
ated in his own country as he deserves — and this in 
spite of the facts that his novels are widely read and his 
name is in all the magazines. What I mean is, that in 
the conversation of the cultured circles of Boston or 
New York too much stress is apt to be laid on the 
prosaic and commonplace character of his materials. 
There are, perhaps, unusually good reasons for this 
point of view. Cromwell's wife and daughters would 
probably prefer to have him painted wartless, but pos- 
terity Avants him Avarts and all. So those to whom the 



172 The Land of Contrasts 

average — the very average — American is an every-day 
and all-day occurrence cannot abide him in their litera- 
ture ; while we who are removed by the ocean of space 
can enjo}^ these pictures of common life, as enabling us, 
better than any idealistic romance or study of the rare 
and extraordinary, to realise the life of our American 
cousins. To those who can read between the hues with 
any discretion, I should say that novels like " Silas 
Lapham " and " A Modern Instance " will give a clearer 
idea of American character and tendencies than any 
other contemporary works of fiction ; to those who can 
read between the lines — for it is obvious that the 
commonplace and the slightly vulgar no more exhaust 
the field of society in the United States than elsewhere. 
But to me Mr. Howells, even when in his most realistic 
and sordid vein, always suggests the ideal and the noble ; 
the reverse of the medal proclaims loudl}^ that it is the 
reverse, and that there is an obverse of a very different 
kind to be seen by those who will turn the coin. It seems 
to me that no very great pahieontological skill is neces- 
sary to reconstruct the whole frame of the animal from 
the portion that Mr. Howells sets up for us. His novels 
remind me of those maps of a limited area which indi- 
cate very clearly what lies beyond, by arrows on their 
margins. In nothing does Mr. Howells more clearly 
show his " Americanism '' than in liis almost divinely 
sympathetic and tolerant attitude towards commonplace, 
erring, vulgar humanity. '' Ah, poor real life, which I 
love ! " he writes somewhere ; " can I make otliers share 
the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face ! " 
We must remember in reading liim his own theory of 
the duty of the novelist. " I am extremely opposed 



Some Literary Straws 173 

to what we call ideal characters. I think their por- 
trayal is mischievous ; it is altogether offensive to me 
as an artist, and, as far as the morality goes, I believe 
that when an artist tries to create an ideal he mixes 
some truth up with a vast deal of sentimentality, and 
produces something that is extremely noxious as well as 
nauseous. I think that no man can consistently portray 
a probal)le type of human character without being useful 
to his readers. When he endeavors to create something 
higher than that, he plays the fool himself and tempts 
his readers to folly. He tempts young men and women 
to try to form themselves upon models that would be 
detestable in life, if they were ever found there." 

Perhaps the delicacy of Mr. Howells' touch and the 
gentle subtlety of his satire are nowhere better illus- 
trated than in the little drawing-room " farces " of which 
he frequently publishes one in an American magazine 
about Cliristmas time. I call them farces because he 
himself applies that name to them ; but these dainty 
little comediettas contain none of the rollicking qualities 
which the word usually connotes to English ears. They 
have all the finesse of the best French work of the kind, 
combined with a purity of atmosphere and of intent that 
we are apt to claim as Anglo-Saxon, and which, perhaps, 
is especially characteristic of America. One is tired of 
hearing, in this connection, of the blush that rises to 
the innocent girFs cheek ; but why should even those 
who are supposed to be past the age of blushing not also 
enjoy humour unspiced by even a suggestion of lubricity ? 
The " Mikado " and " Pinafore " have done yeoman's 
service in displacing the meretricious deliglits of Offen- 
bach and Lecocq ; and Howells' little pieces yield an 



174 ^^^^ Land of Contrasts 

exquisite, though iunocent, enjojmeut to those whose 
taste in farces has not been fashioned and spoiled by 
chimsy English adaptations or imitations of intriguing 
levers-de-rldeau, and to those who do not associate the 
name of farce with horse-play and practical joking. 
They form the best illustration of what has been de- 
scribed as Mr. Ho wells' " method of occasionally opening 
up to the reader through the bewilderingly intricate 
mazes of his dialogue clear perceptions of the true values 
of his characters, imitating thus the actual trick of life, 
which can safely be depended on to now and then expose 
meanings that words have cleverly served the purpose 
of concealing." If I hesitate to call them comediettas 
'' in porcelain,"' it is because the suggested analogy falls 
short, owing to the greater reconditeness, the purer intel- 
lectual quality, of Mr. Howells' humour as compared 
with Mr. Austin Dobson's. So intensely American in 
quality are these scenes from the lives of Mr. and Mrs. 
Willis Campbell, Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, and their friends, 
that it sometimes seems to me that they might almost 
be used as touchstones for the advisability of a visit 
to the United States. If you can appreciate and enjoy 
these farces, go to America by all means ; you will have 
a "good time." If you cannot, better stay at home, 
unless your motive is merely one of base mechanic 
necessity ; you will find the American atmosphere a 
little too rare. 

A recent phase of Mr. Howells' activity — that, namely, 
in wliich, like Mr. William Morris, he has boldly risked 
his reputation as a literary artist in order to espouse 
unpopular social causes of Avhose justice he is con- 
vinced — will interest all who have hearts to feel as Avell 



Some Literary Straws 175 

as brains to think. He made his fame by consummately 
artistic work, addressed to the daintiest of literary 
palates; and yet in such books as "A Hazard of New 
Fortunes " and " A Traveller from Altruria " he lias con- 
scientiously taken up the defence and propagation of a 
form of socialism, without blanching before the epicure 
who demands his literature " neat " or the Philistine 
householder who brands all socialistic writings as 
dangerous. Mr. Howells, however, knows his public ; 
and the reforming element in him cannot but rejoice at 
the hearing he has won through its artistic counterpart. 
No one of his literary brethren of any importance has, 
so far as I know, emulated his courage in this particular. 
Some, like Mr. Bellamy, have made a reputation by their 
socialistic writings ; none has risked so magnificent a 
structure already built up on a purely artistic founda- 
tion. It is mainly on account of this phase of his work, 
in which he has not forsaken his art, but makes it " the 
expression of his whole life and the thought and feeling 
mature life has brought to him," that Mr. Howells has 
been claimed as the American novelist, the best delinea- 
tor of American life.^ 

Mr. Howells the poet is not nearly so well known as 
Mr. Howells the novelist ; and there are doubtless many 
European students of American literature who are un- 
aware of the extremely characteristic work he has done 
in verse. The accomplished critic, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, 
writes thus of a volume of poems published by Mr. 

^ Perhaps Mr. Georoe W, Cable is entitled to rank with Mr. Howells in this 
respect as a man who refused to disguise his moral convictions behind his 
literary art, and thus infallibly and with full consciousness imperilled his popu- 
larity among his own people. 



176 The Land of Contrasts 

Howells about three years ago : ^ " There is something 
here which, if not new in American poetry, has never 
before made itself so manifest there, never before 
declared itself with such vivacity and force, the process 
by which it emerged from emotion and clothed itself in 
speech being so undiscoverable by critical analysis that 
it seems, as Matthew Arnold said of some of Words- 
Avorth's poetry, as if Nature took the pen from his hand 
and wrote in his stead." These poems are all short, 
and their titles (such as '' What Shall It Profit? " '' The 
Sphinx," "If," " To-morrow," " Good Society," " Equal- 
ity," '' Heredity,'' and so forth) sufficiently indicate 
that they do not rank among the lighter triflings with 
the muse. Their abiding sense of an awful and inevi- 
table fate, their keen realisation of the startling con- 
trasts between wealth and poverty, their symbolical 
grasp on the great realities of life and death, and the 
consummate skill of the artistic setting are all pervaded 
with something that recalls the paintings of Mr. G. F. 
Watts or the visions of Miss Olive Schreiner. One spec- 
imen can alone be given here : 

** The Bewildered Guest 

" I was not asked if I should like to come. 
I have not seen my host here since I came, 
Or had a word of welcome in his name. 
Some say that we shall never see him, and some 
That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know 
Why we were bid. How long I am to stay -^ 

I have not the least notion. None, they say, 
Was ever told when he should come or go. * 

1" Stops of Various Quills," by W. D. Howells (Harper & Brothers, New 
York, 1895). 



Some Literary Straws 177 

But every now and then there bursts upon 

The song and mirth a lamentable noise, 

A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys 

Dumb in om- breasts; and then, someone is gone. 

They say we meet him. None knows where or when. 

We know we shall not meet him here again," 

Mr. Howells has, naturally enough, the defects of his 
qualities ; and if it were my purpose here to present an 
exhaustive study of his writings, rather than merely to 
touch lightly upon his '' American " characteristics, it 
would be desiral)le to consider some of these in this place. 
In his desire to avoid the merely pompous he sometimes 
falls into the really trifling. His love of analysis runs 
away with him at times ; and parts of such books as 
" A World of Chance " must Aveary all but his most un- 
discriminating admirers. His self-restraint sometimes 
disappoints us of a vivid colour or a passionate throb 
which we feel to be our due. His humour and his satire 
occasionally pass from the line to the thin. 

It is, however, with Mr. Howells in his capacity of 
literary critic alone that my disappointment is too great 
to allow of silence. For the exquisiteness of a writer 
like Mr. Henry James he lias the keenest insight, the 
warmest appreciation. His thorough-going conviction 
in the prime necessity of realism even leads him out of 
his way to commend Gabriele d'Annunzio, in whom 
some of us can detect little but a more than Zolaesque 
coarseness with a total lack of Zola's genius, insight, 
purpose, or philosophy^ But when he comes to speak of a 
Thackeray or a Scott, his attitude is one that, to put it 
in the most complimentary form that I can tliink of, re- 
minds us stronglv of Homeric drowsiness. The virtue of 



178 The Land of Contrasts 

James is one thing and the virtue of Scott is another; 
but surely admiration for both does not make too un- 
reasonable a demand on catholicity of palate? Mr. 
Howells could never write himself down an ass, but 
surely in his criticism of the " Wizard of the North " he 
has written himself down as one whose literary creed is 
narrower than his human heart. The school of which 
Mr. Henry James is a most accomplished member has 
added more than one exquisite new flavour to the ban- 
quet of letters ; but it may well be questioned whether 
a taste for these may not be acquired at too dear a cost 
if it necessitates a loss of relish for the steady good 
sense, the power of historic realisation, the rich human- 
ity, and the marvellously fertile imagination of Walter 
Scott. It is not, I hope, a merely national prejudice 
that makes me oppose Mr. How^ells in this point, though, 
perhaps, there is a touch of remonstrance in the reflec- 
tion that that great novelist seems to have no use for 
the Briton in his works except as a foil or a butt for his 
American characters. 

In considering Mr. Howells as an exponent of Ameri- 
canism in literature, we have left him in an attitude 
almost of Americanus contra mundu77i — at any rate in the 
posture of one who is so entirely absorbed by his delight 
in the contemporary and national existence around him 
as to be partially blind to claims separated from him by 
tracts of time and space. My next example of the 
American in literature is, I think, to the full as national 
a type as Mr. How^ells, though her Americanism is 
shown rather in subjective character than in objective 
theme. Miss Emily Dickinson is still a name so un- 
familiar to English readers that I may be pardoned a 



Some Literary Straws 179 

few lines of biographical explanation. She was born in 
1830, the daughter of the leading lawyer of Amherst, a 
small and quiet town of New England, delightfully 
situated on a hill, looking out over the undulating 
woods of the Connecticut valley. It is a little larger 
than the English Marlborough, and like it owes its dis- 
tinctive tone to the presence of an important educa- 
tional institute, Amherst College being one of the best- 
known and worthiest of the smaller American colleges. 
In this quiet little spot Miss Dickinson spent the whole 
of her life, and even to its limited societ}^ she was almost 
as invisible as a cloistered nun except for her appearances 
at an annual reception given by her father to the digni- 
taries of the town and college. There was no definite 
reason either in her physical or mental health for this 
life of extraordinary seclusion ; it seems to have been 
simply the natural outcome of a singularly introspective 
temperament. She rarely showed or spoke of her poems 
to any but one or two intimate friends ; only three or 
four were published during her lifetime ; and it was 
with considerable surprise that her relatives found, on 
her death in 1886, a large mass of poetical remains, 
finished and unfinished. A considerable selection from 
them has been published in three little volumes, edited 
with tender appreciation l)y two of her friends, Mrs. 
Mabel Loomis Todd and Col. T. W. Higginson. 

Her poems are all in lyrical form — if the word form 
may be applied to her utter disregard of all metrical 
conventions. Her lines are rugged and her expressions, 
wayward to an extraordinary degree, but "her verses all 
show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music," and 
the " thought-rhymes " which she often substitutes for 



i8o The Land of Contrasts 

the more regular assonances appeal '' to an unrecognised 
sense more elusive than hearing" (Mrs. Todd). In 
this curious divergence from estahlished rules of verse 
Miss Dickinson may be likened to Walt Whitman, 
whom she differs from in every other particular, and 
notably in her pithiness as opposed to his diffuseness ; 
but with her we feel in the strongest way that her mode 
is natural and unsought, utterly free from affectation, 
posing, or self-consciousness. 

Colonel Higginson rightly finds her nearest analogue 
in William Blake ; but this " nearest " is far from iden- 
tity. While tenderly feminine in her sympathy for suffer- 
ing, her love of nature, her loyalty to her friends, she is 
in expression the most unfeminine of poets. The usual 
feminine impulsiveness and full expression of emotion is 
replaced in her by an extraordinary condensation of 
plirase and feeling. In her letters we find the eternal 
womanly in her yearning love for her friends, her brood- 
ing anxiet}^ and sympathy for the few lives closely in- 
tertwined with her own. In her poems, however, one is 
rather impressed with the deep well of poetic insight 
and feeling from which she draws, but never unre- 
servedly. In spite of frequent strange exaggeration of 
phrase one is always conscious of a fund of reserve force. 
The subjects of her poems are few, but the piercing 
delicacy and depth of vision with which she turned from 
death and eternity to nature and to love make us feel 
the presence of that rare thing, genius. Hers is a 
wonderful instance of the way in which genius can dis- 
pense with experience ; she sees more by pure intuition 
than others distil from the serried facts of an eventful 
life. Perhaps, in one of her own phrases, she is " too 



Some Literary Straws i8i 

intrinsic for renown," but she has appealed strongly to a 
surprisingly large band of readers in the United States, 
and it seems to me will always hold her audience. Those 
who admit Miss Dickinson's talent, but deny it to be 
poetry, may be referred to Thoreau's saying that no defini- 
tion of poetry can be given which the true poet will not 
somewhere sometime brush aside. It is a new departs 
ure, and the writer in the Nation (Oct. 10, 1895) is 
probably right when he says : '^ So marked a new depart- 
ure rarely leads to further growth. Neither Whitman 
nor Miss Dickinson ever stepped beyond the circle they 
first drew." 

It is difficult to select quite adequate samples of Miss 
Dickinson's art, but perhaps the following little poems 
will give some idea of her naked simplicity, terseness, 
oddness, — of her method, in short, if we can apply that 
word to anything so spontaneous and unconscious : 

" I'm nobody ! Who are you ? 
Are you nobody, too ? 
Then there's a pair of us. Don't tell ! 
They'd banish us, you know. 

" How dreary to be somebody ! 
How public, like a frog. 
To tell your name the livelong day 
To an admiring bog ! " 



I taste a liquor never brewed, 
From tankards scooped in pearl ; 
Not all the vats upon the Rhine 
Yield such an alcohol ! 

' Inebriate of air am I, 
And debauchee of dew. 



1 82 The Land of Contrasts 

Reeling, tliruugh endless summer days. 
From inns of molten blue. 

'• When landlords turn the drunken bee 
Out of the foxglove's door. 
When butterflies renounce their drams, 
I shall but drink the more ! 

•' nil seraphs swing their snowy hats. 
And saints to windows run. 
To see the little tippler 
LeAuinsT against the sun ! " 



But how he set I know not. 
There seemed a purple stile 
Which little yellow boys and girls 
Were climbing all the while, 

• Till when they reached the other side, 
A dominie in grey 
Put gently up the evening bars. 
And led the flock awav." 



'• He preached upon * breadth " till it argued him narrow — 
The broad are too broad to define : 
And of ' truth * until it proclaimed him a liar — 
The truth never flaunted a sign. 
Simplicity fled from his counterfeit presence 
As gold the pyrites would shun. 
What confusion would cover the innocent Jesus 
To meet so enabled a man ! ~ 

The '' so enabled a man " is a very characteristic Diek- 
insonian phnise. So. too, are these : 

" He put the belt around my life — 
I heard the buckle snap.** 



Some Literary Straws iS^^ 

Unfitted by an instant's grace 
For the contented beo-o-ar's face 
I wore an hour ao-o." 



Just his sigh, accented, 
Had been legible to me." 



♦* The bustle in a house 
The morning after death 
Is solemnest of industries 
Enacted upon earth — 
The sweei^ing up the heart, 
And putting love away 
We shall not want to use again 
Until eternity." 

Her interest in all the familiar sights and sounds of a 
villao-e o-arden is evident throno-h all her verses. Her 
illustrations are not recondite, literary, or conventional ; 
she finds them at her own door. The robin, the butter- 
cup, the maple, furnish ^vhat she needs. The bee, in 
particular, seems to have had a peculiar fascination for 
her, and liums through all her poems. She had even a 
kindly word for that " neglected son of genius," the 
spider. Her love of children is equally evident, and no 
one has ever better caught the spirit of 

" Saturday Afternoon 

" From all the jails the boys and girls 
Ecstatically leap. 
Beloved, only afternoon 
That prison doesn't keep. 

"They storm the earth and stun the air, 
A mob of solid bliss. 



184 The Land of Contrasts 

Alas! that frowns could lie in wait 
For such a foe as this ! " 

The bokl extravagance of her diction (which is not, 
however, mere extravagance) and her ultra-American 
familiarity Avith the forces of nature may be illustrated 
by such stanzas as : 

'* What if the poles should frisk about 
And stand upon their heads ! 
I hope Tni ready for the worst, 
Whatever prank betides." 



*' If I could see you in a year, 
rd wind the months in balls, 
And put them each in separate drawers 
Until their time befalls. 

•' If certain, when tliis life was out, 
That yours and mine should be, 
I'd toss it yonder like a rind. 
And taste eternity." 

For her the lightnings "skip like mice," the thunder 
" crumbles like a stuff." What a critic has called her 
" Emersonian self-possession " towards God may be seen 
in the little poem on the last page of her first volume, 
where she addresses the Deity as "burglar, banker, 
father." There is, however, no flippancy in this, no 
conscious irreverence ; Miss Dickinson is not " ortho- 
dox," but she is genuinely spiritual and religious. 
Inspired by its truly American and " actuel " freedom, 
her muse does not fear to sing of such modern and 
mechanical phenomena as the railway train, which she 
loves to see " lap the miles and lick the valleys up," 



Some Literary Straws 185 

while she is fascinated by the contrast between its pro- 
digious force and the way in which it stops, " docile and 
omnipotent, at its own stable door." But even she can 
hardly bring the smoking locomotive into such pathetic 
relations with nature as the " little brig," whose " white 
foot tripped, then dropped from sight," leaving ''the 
ocean's heart too smooth, too blue, to break for you." 

Her poems on death and the beyond, on time and 
eternity, are full of her peculiar note. Death is the 
" one dignity " that " delays for all ; " the meanest brow 
is so ennobled by the majesty of death that " almost a 
powdered footman might dare to touch it now," and yet 
no beggar would accept " the eclat of death, had he the 
power to spurn." " The quiet nonchalance of death " is 
a resting-place which has no terrors for her; death 
" abashed " her no more than "the porter of her father's 
lodge." Death's chariot also holds Immortality. The 
setting sail for " deep eternity " brings a " divine intoxi- 
cation " such as the "inland soul" feels on its "first 
league out from land." Though she " never spoke with 
God, nor visited in heaven," she is " as certain of the 
spot as if the chart were given." " In heaven some- 
how, it will be even, some new equation given." 
" Christ will explain each separate anguish in the fair 
schoolroom of the sky." 

" A death-blow is a life-blow to some 
Who, till they died, did not alive become; 
Who, had they lived, had died, but when 
They died, vitality begun." 

The reader who has had the patience to accompany me 
through these pages devoted to Miss Dickinson will 



1 86 The Land of Contrasts 

surely own, whether in scoff or praise, the essentially 
^Vmerican nature of her muse. Her defects are easily 
paralleled in the annals of English literature ; but only 
in the liberal atmosphere of the New World, compara- 
tively unshadowed b}^ trammels of authority and 
standards of taste, could they have co-existed with so 
much of the highest quality. 

A prominent phenomenon in the development of 
American literature — so prominent as to call for com- 
ment even in a fragmentary and haphazard sketch like 
the present — is the influence exercised by the monthly 
magazine. The editors of the leading literary periodicals 
have been practically able to wield a censorship to 
which there is no parallel in England. The magazine 
has been the recognised gateway to the literary public ; 
the SAveep of the editorial net has been so wide that it 
has gathered in nearly all the best literary work of the 
past few decades, at any rate in the department of belles 
letti^es. It is not easy to name many important works of 
pure literature, as distinct from the scientific, the philo- 
sophical, and the instructive, that have not made tlieir 
bow to the public through the pages of the Century^ the 
Atlantic Montlily^ or some one or other of their leading 
competitors. And probably the proportion of works by 
new authors that have appeared in the same way is still 
greater. There are, possibly, two sides as to the value 
of this supremacy of the magazine, though to most observ- 
ers the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages. 
Among the former may be reckoned the general encour- 
agement of reading, the opportunities afforded to young 
writers, the raising of the rate of authors' pay, the dis- 
semination of a vast quantity of useful and salutary 



Some Literary Straws 187 

information in a popular form. Perhaps of more impor- 
tance than any of these has been the maintenance of that 
purity of moral tone in which modern American litera- 
ture is superior to all its contemporaries. Malcontents 
may rail at "-grandmotherly legislation in letters," at the 
undue deference paid to the maiden's blush, at the 
encouragement of the mealy-mouthed and hypocritical ; 
but it is a ground of very solid satisfaction, be the cause 
what it may, that recent American literature has been so 
free from the emasculate fin-de-sie de-ism, the nauseating 
pseudo-realism, the epigrammatic hysteria, that has of 
late been so rife in certain British circles. Moreover, it 
is impossible to believe that any really strong talent 
could have been stifled by the frown of the magazine 
editor. Walt Whitman made his mark without that 
potentate's assistance ; and if America had produced a 
Zola, he would certainly have come to the front, even if 
his genius had been hampered with a Imrden of more 
than Zolaesque filth. 

It is undoubtedly to the predominance of the magazine, 
among other causes, that are due the prevalence and 
perfection of the American short story. It has often 
been remarked that French literature alone is superior 
in this genj^e ; and many of the best American produc- 
tions of the kind can scarcely be called second even to 
the French in daintiness of phrase, sureness of touch, 
sense of proportion, and skilful condensation of interest. 
Excellent examples of the short story have been common 
in American literature from the times of Hawthorne,- 
Irving, and Poe down to the present day. Mr. Henry 
James, perhaps, stands at the head of living writers in 
this brancli. Miss Mary E. Wilkins is inimitable in her 



1 88 The Land of Contrasts 

sketches of New England, the pathos, as Avell as the 
humour of which she touches Avith a master hand. It is 
interesting to note that, foreign as her subject would 
seem to be to the French taste, her literary skill has 
been duly recognised by the Revue des JDeux Mondes. 
Bret Harte and Frank Stockton are so eminently short- 
story Avriters that the longer their stories become, the 
nearer do they approach the brink of failure. Other 
names that suggest themselves in a list that might be 
indefinitely extended are those of Miss Jewett, Mrs. 
Elizabeth Phelps Ward, Mr. Richard Harding Davis, 
Mr. T. B. Aldrich, Mr. Thos. Nelson Page, Mr. Owen 
Wister, Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mr. G. W. Cable, and (in 
a lighter vein) Mr. H. C. Bunner. 

This chapter may fitly close with a straw of startling 
literary contrast, that seems to me alone almost enougli 
to bring American literature under the rubric of this 
volume's title. If a critic familiar only with the work 
chiefly associated with the author's name were asked to 
indicate the source of the following quotations, I should 
be surprised if he were to guess correctly in his first 
hundred efforts. Indeed, I should not be astonished if 
some of liis shots missed the mark by centuries of time 
as well as oceans of space. One hesitates to use lightly 
the Avord Elizabethan ; but at present I do not recall 
any other modern Avork that suggests it more strongly 
than some of tlie lines I quote beloAV : 

** So AA^anton are all emblems that the cloak 
Which folds a king will kiss a crooked nail 
As quickly as a beggars gabardine 
Will do like office." 



Some Literary Straws 189 

Thou art so like to substance that Vd think 
Myself a shadow ere th^'self a dream. " 



" Not so much beauty, sire, 
As would make full the pocket of thine eye." 



*' A vein 
That spilt its tender blue upon her eyelid, 
As though the cunning hand that dyed her eyes 
Had slipped for joy of its own work." 



■ What am I who doth rail against the fate 
That binds mankind ? The atom of an atom, 
Particle of this particle the earth, 
That with its million kindred worlds doth spin 
Like motes within the universal light. 
What if I sin — am lost— do crack my life 
Against the gateless walls of Fate's decree? 
Is the world fouler for a gnat's corpse ? Nay, 
The ocean, is it shallower for the drop 
It leaves upon a blade of grass ? " 



** There is a boy in Essex, they do say, 
Can crack an ox's ribs in one arm-crotch." 

All these passages are taken from the tragedy of 
" Athelwolcl," written by Miss Amelie Rives, the author 
of a novel entitled '' The Quick and the Dead." 



XI 

Certain Features of Certain Cities 

ONE of the dicta in M. Bourget's " Outre Mer " 
to which I cannot but take exception is that 
which insists on the essential simiharity and 
monotony of all the cities of the United 
States. Passing over the question of the right of a 
Parisian to quarrel with monotony of street architect- 
ure, I should simply ask what single country possesses 
cities more widely divergent than New York and New 
Orleans, Philadelphia and San Francisco, Chicago and 
San Antonio, Washington and Pittsburg? If M. Bour- 
get merely means that there is a tendency to homogene- 
ity in the case of modern cities which was not compatible 
with the picturesque though uncomfortable reasons for 
variety in more ancient foundations, his remark amounts 
to a truism. For his implied comparison with European 
cities to have any point, he should be able to assert that 
the recent architecture of the different cities of Europe 
is more varied than the contemporary architecture of the 
United States. This seems to me emphatically not the 
case. Modern Paris resembles modern Rome more 
closely than any two of the above-named cities resemble 
each other ; and it is simply the universal tendency to 
note similarity first and then unlikeness that makes 
the brief visitor to tlie United States fail to find char- 
acteristic individuality in the various great cities of the 

190 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 191 

country. We are also too prone to forget that the 
United States, though continental in its proportions, is 
after all but a single nation, enjoying the same institu- 
tions and speaking practically one tongue ; and this of 
necessity introduces an element of sameness that must 
be absent from the continent of Europe with which 
we are apt to compare it. If we oppose to the United 
States that one European country which approaches it 
most nearly in size, Ave shall, I think, find the balance 
of uniformity does not incline to the American side. 
When all is said, however, it cannot be denied that 
there is a great deal of similarity in the smaller and 
newer towns and cities of the West, and Mr. W. S. 
Caine's likening them to " international exhibitions a 
week before their opening " will strike many visitors as 
very apposite. It is only to the indiscriminate and 
unhedged form of M. Bourget's statement that objection 
need be made. 

Architecture struck me as, perhaps, the one art in 
which America, so far as modern times are concerned, 
could reasonably claim to be on a par with, if not ahead 
of, any European country whatsoever. I say this with 
a full realisation of the many artistic nightmares that 
oppress the soil from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with a 
perfect recollection of the acres of petty, monotonous, and 
mean structures in almost every great city of the Union, 
with a keen appreciation of the witty saying that the 
American architect often "shows no more self-restraint 
than a l)unch of fire-crackers." It is, however, disr 
tinctly true, as Mr. Montgomery Schuyler well puts it, 
that "no progress can result from the la])our of archi- 
tects whose training has made them so fastidious that 



192 



The Land of Contrasts 



they are more revolted by the crudity of the foriix^ that 
result from the attempt to express a new meaning than 
by the failure to make the attempt ; " and it is in his 
freedom from this fastidious lack of courage that the 
American architect is strong. His earlier efforts at in- 
dependence were, perhaps, hardly fortunate ; but he is 
now entering a phase in which adequate professional 
knowledge coi)[)erates with good taste to define the limits 
within Avhich his imagination may legitimately work. I 
know not where to look, within the last quarter of a cen- 
tury or so, for more tasteful designs, greater sincerity of 
purpose, or happier adaptations to environment than the 
best creations of men like Mr. H. H. Richardson, Mr. R. 
M. Hunt, Mr. J. W. Root, Mr. G. B. Post, and Messrs. 
McKim, Mead, and White. Some of the new residen- 
tial streets of places as recent as Chicago or St. Paul 
more than hold their own, as it seems to me, with any 
contemporaneous thoroughfares of their own class in 
Europe. To my own opinion let me add the valuable 
testimony of Mr. E. A. Freeman, in his " Impressions of 
the United States '' (pp. 246, 247) : 

I fomid the modern churches, of various denominations, 
certainly better, as works of architecture, than I had 
expected. They may quite stand beside the average of 
modern churches in England, setting aside a few of the 
very best. . . . But I thought the churches, whose style 
is most commonly Gothic of one kind or another, decidedly 
less successful than some of the civil buildings. In some of 
these, I hardly know how far by choice, how far by happy 
accident, a style has been hit upon which seemed to me far 
more at home than any of the reproductions of Gothic. 
Much of the street architecture of several cities has very 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 193 

success^ ally caught the leading idea of the true Italian 
style. 

New York, the gateway to America for, perhaps, nine 
out of ten visitors, is described by Mr. Richard Grant 
White, the American writer, as "the dashing, dirty, 
demi-rep of cities." Mr. Joaquin Miller, the poet of the 
Sierras, calls it " an iron-fronted, iron-footed, and iron- 
hearted town." Miss Florence Marryat asserts that 
New York is '^ without any exception the most charming 
cit}^ she has ever been in." Miss Emily Faithful admits 
that at first it seems rough and new, but says that when 
one returns to it from the West, one recognises that it 
has everything essential in common with his European 
experiences. In my own note-book I find that New 
York impressed me as being '-'• like a lady in ball cos- 
tume, with diamonds in her ears, and her toes out at 
her boots." 

Here, then, is evidence that New York makes a pretty 
strong impression on her guests, and that this impression 
is not by any means the same in every case. New York is 
evidently a person of character, and of a character with 
many facets. To most European visitors it must, on the 
whole^ be somewhat of a disappointment ; and it is not 
really an advantageous or even a characteristic portal to 
the American continent. For one thing, it is too over- 
whelmingly cosmopolitan in the composition of its 
population to strike the distinctive American note. It 
is not alone that New York society imitates that of- 
France and England in a more pronounced way than I 
found anywhere else in America, but the names one sees 
over the shops seem predominantly German and Jewish, 



194 



The Land of Contrasts 



accents we are familiar with at home resound in our 
ears, the quarters we are first introduced to recall the 
dinginess and shabbiness of the waterside quarters of 
cities like London and Glasgow. More intimate ac- 
quaintance finds much that is strongly American in 
New York; but this is not the first impression, and 
first impressions count for so much that it seems to me 
a pity that New York is for most travellers the pro- 
logue to their American experiences. 

The contrasts between the poverty and wealth of New 
York are so extreme as sometimes to suggest even 
London, where misery and prosperity rub shoulders in 
a more heartrending way than, perhaps, anywhere else 
in the wide world. But the contrasts that strike even 
the most unobservant visitor to the so-called Amer- 
ican " metropolis " are of a different nature. AVhen I was 
asked by American friends what had most struck me in 
America, I sometimes answered, if in malicious mood, 
" The fact that the principal street of the largest and 
richest city in the Union is so miserably paved ; " and, 
indeed, my recollections of the holes in Broadway, and 
of the fact that in wintry weather 1 had sometimes to 
diverge into University Place in order to avoid a mid- 
shin crossing of liquid mud in Broadwa3s seem as 
strange as if they related to a dream.^ New York, 
again, possesses some of the most sumptuous private 
residences in the world, often adorned in particular with 
exquisite carvings in stone, such as Europeans have 
sometimes furnished for a cathedral or minster, but which 
it lias been reserved for repul)lican simplicity to apply 

^ This refers to 1893 ; tliia"s are much better now. 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 195 

to the residence of a private citizen.^ Yet it is by no 
means ausc/eschlossen^ as the Germans say, that the pave- 
ment in front of this abode of Inxury may not be seamed 
by huge cracks and rents that make walking after night- 
fall positively dangerous. 

Fifth Avenue is not, to my mind, one of the most attrac- 
tive city streets in the United States, but it is, perhaps, 
the one that makes the greatest impression of prosperity. 
It is eminently solid and substantial ; it reeks with 
respectability and possibly dulness. It is a very alder- 
man among streets. The shops at its lower end, and 
gradually creeping up higher like the modest guest of 
the parable, make no appeal to the lightly pursed, but 
are as aristocratic-looking as those of Hanover Square. 
Its liotels and clubs are equally suggestive of well-lined 
pockets. Its churches more than hint at golden offer- 
tories ; and the visitor is not surprised to be assured (as he 
infallibly will be) that the pastor of one of them preaches 
every Sunday to '' two hundred and fifty million dollars." 
Even the beautiful Roman Catholic cathedral lends its 
aid to this impression, and encourages the faithful by a 
charge of fifteen to twenty-five cents for a seat. The 
" stoops " of the lugubrious brown sandstone houses 
seem to retain something more of their Dutch origin 
than the mere name. The Sunday Parade here is better 
dressed than that of Hyde Park, but candour compels me 
to admit, at the expense of my present point, consider- 
ably less stiff and non-committal. Indeed, were it not 

1 This suggestion of topsy-turvydom in the rehitions of God and Mammon 
is much intensified when we find an apartment house like the " Osborne " 
towering- high above the church-spire on the opposite side of the way, or see 
Trinity Church simply smothered by the contiguous office buildings. 



196 The Land of Contrasts 

for the miserable horses of the "stage lines" Fifth Ave- 
nue might present a clean bill of unimpeachable affluence. 

Madison Avenue, hitherto uninvaded by shops, rivals 
Fifth Avenue in its suggestions of extreme well-to- 
do-ness, and should be visited, if for no other reason, 
to see the Tiffany house, one of the most daring and 
withal most captivating experiments known to me in city 
residences. 

Unlike those of many other American cities, the best 
houses of New York are ranged side by side without 
the interposition of the tiniest bit of garden or greenery; 
it is only in the striking but unfinished River- 
side Drive, Avith its grand views of the Hudson, that 
architecture derives any aid whatsoever from natural 
formations or scenic conditions. The student of archi- 
tecture should not fail to note the success with which 
the problem of giving expression to a town house of 
comparatively simple outline has often been tackled, 
and he will find many charming single features, such as 
doors, or balconies, or windows. Good examples of these 
are the exquisite oriel and other decorative features of 
the house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, by Mr. Hunt, in 
Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 52d Street, and speci- 
mens will also be found in 34th, 36th, 37th, 43d, 52d, 
56th, and 57th Streets, near their junction with Fifth 
Avenue. The W. H. Vanderbilt houses (Fifth Avenue, 
between 50th and 51st Streets) have been described as 
" brown-stone boxes with architecture applique ; " but 
the applied carving, though meaningless enough as far 
as its position goes, is so exquisite in itself as to deserve 
more than a passing glance. The iron railings Avliich 
surround the houses are beautiful specimens of metal- 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 197 

Avork. The house of Mr. Cornelius Vanclerbilt, a little 
farther up the avenue, with its red brick and slates, and 
its articulations and dormers of grey limestone, is a 
good example of an effective use of colour in tlomestic 
architecture — an effect which the clear, dry climate of 
New York admits and perpetuates.' The row of quiet 
oldtime houses on the north side of Washington Square 
will interest at least the historical student of archi- 
tecture, so characteristic are they of times of restfulness 
and peace to which New York has long been a stranger. 
Down towards the point of the island, in the " city " 
proper, the visitor will find many happy creations for 
modern mercantile purposes, besides such older objects 
of architectural interest as Trinity Church and the City 
Hall, praised by Professor Freeman and many other con- 
noisseurs of both continents. Among these business 
structures may be named the " Post Building," the 
building of the Union Trust Company (No. 80 Broad- 
way), and the Guernsey Building (also in Broadway). 
At the extreme apex of Manhattan Island lie the his- 
toric Bowling Green and Battery Park, the charm of 
which has not been wholly annihilated by the intrusion 
of the elevated railway. Here rises the huge rotunda 
of Castle Garden, through which till lately all the immi- 
grants to New York made their entry into the New 
World. Surely this has a pathetic interest of its own 
when we consider what this landing meant to so many 
thousands of the poor and needy. A suitable motto for 
its hospitable portals would have been, "Imbibe new 
hope, all ye who enter here." 

1 Compare Montgomery Schuyler's " American Architecture," an excellent 
though brief account and appreciation of modern American building. 



ic)8 The Land of Contrasts 

As 1 have said, there is no lack of good Americanism 
in New York. Let the Englishman who does not be- 
lieve in an American school of sculpture look at St. 
Gaudens' statue of Admiral Farragut in Madison 
Square, and say Avhere we have a better or as good a 
single figure in any of our streets. Let him who thinks 
that fine public picture galleries are confined to Europe 
go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^ with its treasures 
by Rembrandt and Rubens, Holbein and Van Dyck, 
Frans Hals and Teniers, Reynolds and Hogarth, Meis- 
sonier and Detaille, Rosa Bonheur and Troyon, Corot 
and Breton. Let the admirer of engineering marvels, 
after he has sufficiently appreciated the elastic strength 
of the Brooklyn Suspension Bridge, betake himself to 
the other end of the island and enjoy the more solid, but 
in their way no less imposing, proportions of the Wash- 
ington Bridge over the Harlem, and let him choose his 
route by the Ninth-avenue Elevated Railroad with its 
dizzy curve at 110th street. And, finally, let not the 
lover of the picturesque fail to enjoy the views from the 
already named Riverside Drive, the cleverly created 
beauties of Central Park, and the district known as 
Washington Heights. 

The Englishman in New York will probably here 
make his first acquaintance with the American system of 
street nomenclature ; and if he at once masters its few 
simple principles, it will be strange if he does not find it 
of great utility and convenience. The objection usually 
made to it is that the numbering of streets, instead of 

1 The position of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is so assured that in 1896 
its trustees declined a bequest of 90 paintings (claiming to include specimens 
of Velazquez, Titian, Rubens, and other great artists), because it was ham- 
pered with the condition that it had to be accepted and exhibited en bloc. 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 199 

iitiming them, is painfully arithmeticcil, bald, and un- 
interesting ; but if a man stays long enough to be really 
familiar with the streets, he will find that the bare 
numbers soon clothe themselves with association, and 
Fiftli Avenue will come to have as distinct an individu- 
ality as Broadway, while 23d Street will call up as 
definite a picture of shopping activity as Bond Street 
or Piccadilly. The chief trouble is the facility of con- 
fusing such an address as No. 44 East 45th Street with 
No. 45 East 44th Street ; and so natural is an inversion 
of the kind that one is sometimes heedless enough to 
make it in writing one's own address. 

The transition from New York to Boston in a chapter 
like this is as inevitable as the tax-collector, though 
perhaps less ingenuity is now spent in the invention of 
anecdotes typical of the contrasts between these two 
cities since Chicago, by the capture of the World's 
Fair, drew upon herself the full fire of the satire-shotted 
guns of New York's rivalry. It seems to me, however, 
that in many ways there is much more similarity 
between New York and Chicago than between New 
York and Boston, and that it is easier to use the latter 
couple than the former to point a moral or adorn a tale. 
In both New York and Chicago the prevailing note is 
that of wealth and commerce, the dominant social 
impression is one of boundless material luxury, the 
atmosphere is thick with the emanations of those who 
hurry to be rich. I hasten to add that of course this is 
largely tempered by other tendencies and features ; it 
would be especially unpardonable of me to forget the 
eminently intellectual, artistic, and refined aspects of 
New York life of which I was privileged to enjoy 



200 The Land of Contrasts 

glimpses. In Boston, however, there is something 
different. Mere wealth, even in these degenerate days, 
does not seem to play so important a part in her society. 
The names one constantly hears or sees in New York 
are names like Astor, Vanderbilt, Jay Gonld, and 
Bradley-Martin, names which, whatever other qnalities 
they connote, stand first and foremost for mere crude 
wealth. In Boston the prominent public names — the 
names that naturally occur to my mind as I think of 
Boston as I saw it — are Oliver Wendell Holmes, the 
poet and novelist ; Eliot, the college president ; Francis 
Walker, the political economist; Higginson, the gener- 
ous cultivator of classical music; Robert Treat Paine, 
the philanthropist ; Edward Everett Hale ; and others of 
a more or less similar class. Again, in New York and 
in Chicago (Pullman, Marshall Field, Armour) the 
prominent names are emphatically men of to-day and 
seem to change with each generation. In Boston we 
have the names of the first governor and other leaders 
of the early settlers still shining in their descendants 
with almost undiminished lustre. The present mayor 
of Boston, for example, is a member of a family the 
name of which has been illustrious in the city's annals 
for two hundred years. He is the fifth of his name in 
the direct line to gain fame in the public service, and 
the third to occupy the mayor's chair. No less than 
sixteen immediate members of the family are recorded 
in the standard biographical dictionaries of America. 

While doubtless the Attic tales of B(eotian dulness 
were at least as often well invented as true, it is perhaps 
the case that there is generally some ground for the 
popular caricatures of any given conununity. I duly dis- 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 201 

counted the humorous and would-be humorous stories 
of Boston's pedantry that I heard in New York, and 
found that as a rule I had done right so to do. Blue spec- 
tacles are not more prominent in Boston -than elsewhere ; 
its theatres do not make a specialty of Greek plays ; the 
little boys do not petition the Legislature for an increase 
in the hours of school. There 3^et remains, however, a 
basis of truth quite large enough to show the observer 
how the reputation was acquired. It is a solemn fact 
that what would appear in England as ^'No spitting 
allowed in this car " is translated in the electric cars of 
Boston into : " The Board of Health hereby adjudges 
that the deposit of sputum in street-cars is a public 
nuisance." ^ The framer of this announcement would 
undoubtedly speak of the limbs of a piano and allude to 
a spade as an agricultural implement. And in social 
intercourse I have often noticed needless celerity in skat- 
ing over ice that seemed to my ruder British sense quite 
well able to bear any ordinary weight, as well as a certain 
subtlety of allusiveness that appeared to exalt ingenuity 
of phrase at the expense of common sense and common 
candour. Too high praise cannot easily be given to the 
Boston Symphony Concerts ; but it is difficult to avoid a 
suspicion of affectation in the severe criticism one hears 
of the conductor whenever he allows a little music of a 
lighter class than usual to appear on the programme. 

Boston is, in its way, as prolific of contrasts as any 
part of the United States. There is certainly no more 
cultivated centre in the country, and yet the letter r 
is as badly maltreated by the Boston scholar as by the 
veriest cockney. To the ear of Boston centre has pre- 

1 This was chang-CLl to simple English in 1898. 



202 The Land of Contrasts 

cisely the same sound as the name of the lieroine of 
Wagner's '' Flying Dutchman," and its most cultivated 
graduates speak of Herbert SpencaA's Datar of Ethics. 
The critical programmes of the Symphony Concerts are 
prepared by one of the ablest of living musical critics, 
and are scholarly almost to excess ; yet, as the observant 
Swiss critic, M. Wagniere, has pointed out, their refined 
and subtle text has to endure the immediate juxtaposi- 
tion of the advertisements of tea-rooms and glove-sellers. 
Boston has the deserved reputation of being one of the 
best-governed cities in America, yet some of its important 
streets seldom see a municipal watering-cart, dust flies 
in clouds both summer and winter, and myriads of life- 
endangering bicycles shoot through its tlioroughfares at 
night without lamps. The Boston matron holds up her 
hands in sanctified horror at the freedom of Western 
manners, and yet it is a local saying, founded on a solid 
basis of fact, that Kenney & Clark (a well-known firm 
of livery-stable keepei*s) are the only chaperon that a 
Boston girl needs in going to or from a ball. The Bos- 
tonians are not the least intelligent of mortals, and yet I 
know no other city in America which is content Avitli 
such an anomalous system of hack hire, where no reduc- 
tion in rate is made for the number of persons. One 
person may drive in a comfortable two-horse brougham 
to any point witliin Boston proper for 50 cents ; two per- 
sons pay 'fl, three persons 11.50, and so on. My advice 
to a quartette of travellers visiting Boston is to hive four 
carriages at once and r/o in a procession, until they find 
a liveryman who sees the point. 

One acute observer has pointed out that it is the men 
of New York who grow haggard, wrinkled, anxious- 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 203 

looking, and prematnrely old in their desperate efforts to 
provide diamonds and balls and Worth costnmes and trips 
to Enroj^e for their debonair, handsome, easy-going, and 
well-nonrished spouses and daughters ; while the men of 
Boston are " joHy tlogs, who make money by legitimate 
trade instead of wild speculation, and show it in their 
countenances, illumined with the light of good cigars and 
champagne and other little luxuries," while their woman- 
kind are constantly worried by the New England con- 
science, and constantly creating anxieties for themselves 
Avhere none exist. There is indeed a large amount of 
truth in this description, if allowance be made for pardon- 
able exaggeration. It is among the women of Boston tliat 
one finds its traditional mantle of intellectuality worn 
most universally, and it is among the women of New York 
that one finds the most characteristic displays of love of 
pleasure and social triumphs. It is, perhaps, not a mere ac- 
cident that the daughters of Boston's millionaires seem to 
marry their fellow-citizens rather than foreign noblemen. 
" None of their money goes to gild rococo coronets." 

I have a good deal of sympathy with a, Canadian friend 
who exclaimed : " Oh, Boston ! I don't include Boston 
when I speak of the United States." Max O'Rell has 
similarly noted that if you wish to hear severe criticism 
of America you have only to go to Boston. " La on loue 
Boston et Angleterre^ et Von debine V Amerique a dire 
d'experts.'' It would be a mistake, however, to infer 
that Boston is not truly American, or that it devotes 
itself to any voluntary imitation of England. In a very- 
deep sense Boston is one of the most intensely American 
cities in the Union ; it represents, perhaps, the finest 
development of many of the most characteristic ideals 



204 The Land of Contrasts 

of Americanism. Its resemblances to England seem to 
be clue to the simple fact that like causes produce like 
results. The original English stock by which Boston 
was founded has remained less mixed here than, perhaps, 
in any other city of America ; and the differences between 
the descendants of the Puritans who emigrated and the 
descendants of those of them who remained at home are 
not complicated by a material infusion of alien blood in 
either case. The independence of the original settlers, 
their hatred of coercion and tyranny, have naturall}^ 
grown with two centuries and a half of democracy ; even 
the municipal administration has not been Avholly 
captured by the Irish voter. The Bostonian has, to a 
very appreciable extent, solved the problem of combining 
the virtues of democracy with the manners of aristocracy ; 
and I know not where you will find a better type of the 
American than the Boston gentleman : patriotic with en- 
lightened patriotism ; finely mannered even to the class 
immediately below his OAvn ; energetic, but not a slave to 
the pursuit of wealth ; liberal in his religion, but witli 
something of the Puritan conscience still lying perdu 
beneath his universalism ; distributing his leisure between 
art, literature, and outdoor occupations ; a little cool in 
his initial manner to strangers, but warmly hospitable 
when his confidence in your merit is satisfied. We, in 
England, may well feel proud that the blood which flow^s 
in the veins of the ideal Bostonian is as distinctly and 
as truly English as that of our own Gladstones and 
Morleys, our Brownings and our Tennysons. 

Prof. Hugo Miinsterberg, of Berlin, writes thus of 
Boston and Chicago : " Ja, Boston ut die HaupMadt 
jenes jungen^ liebetisiverthen, idealistischen Amerikas 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 205 

und wird es bleiben; Chicago dagegen ist die Hochhurg 
der alien protzigen amerikanischen DoUarsucht, und die 
WeltaussteUimg scJdiesslich ist iiherhaupt nicht Amer- 
ika, sondern cliicagosirtes Europa.'" Whatever may be 
thought of the first part of this judgment, the second 
member of it seems to me rather unfair to Chicago and 
emphatically so as regards the Chicago exhibition. 

Since 1893 Chicago ought never to be mentioned as 
Porkopoiis without a simultaneous reference to the fact 
that it was also the creator of tlie White City, Avith its 
Court of Honour, perhaps the most flawless and fairy- 
like creation, on a large scale, of man's invention. We 
expected that America would produce the largest, most 
costly, and most gorgeous of all international exhibi- 
tions ; but who expected that she would produce any- 
thing so inexpressibly poetic, chaste, and restrained, 
such an absolutely refined and soul-satisfying picture, as 
the Court of Honour, with its lagoon and gondolas, its 
wliite marble steps and balustrades, its varied yet har- 
monious buildings, its colonnaded vista of the great 
lake, its impressive fountain, its fairy-like outlining 
after dark by the gems of electricity, its spacious and 
well-modulated proportions which made the largest 
crowd in it but an unobtrusive detail, its air of spon- 
taneity and inevitableness which suggested nature itself, 
rather than art? No other scene of man's creation 
seemed to me so perfect as this Court of Honour. 
Venice, Naples, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Athens, 
Constantinople, each in its way is lovely indeed ; but in 
each view of each of these there is some jarring feature, 
something that we haye to ignore in order to thoroughly 
lose ourselves in the beauty of the scene. The Court of 



2o6 The Land of Contrasts 

Honour was practically blameless ; the lesthetic sense of 
the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as 
in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and 
at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of 
amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art 
could produce. The glamour of old association that 
illumines Athens or A^enice was in a way compensated by 
our deep impression of the pathetic transitoriness of the 
dream of beauty before us, and by the revelation it 
afforded of the soul of a great nation. For it will to all 
time remain impossibly lidiculous to speak of a country 
or a city as wholly given over to the worship of Mammon 
which almost involuntarily gave birth to this etliereal 
emanation of pure and uneconomic beauty. 

Undoubtedly there are few things more dismal than 
the sunless canons which in Chicago are called streets ; 
and the luckless being who is concerned there with 
retail trade is condemned to pass the greater part of his 
life in unrelieved ugliness. Things, however, are rather 
better in the '^ office " quarter ; and he who is ready to 
admit that exigency of site gives some excuse for 
'' elevator architecture " will find a good deal to interest 
him in its practice at Chicago. Indeed, no one can fail 
to wonder at the marvellous skill of architectural engi- 
neering which can run up a building of twenty stories, 
the walls of which are merely a veneer or curtain. Few 
will cavil at the handsome and comfortable equipment 
of the best interiors ; but, given the necessity of their 
existence, the wide-minded lover of art will find some- 
thing to reward his attention even in their exterioi-s. 
In many instances their architects have succeeded 
admirably in steering a middle course between the 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 207 

ornate style of a palace on the one hand and the pack- 
ing case with windows on the other; and the observer 
might unreservedly admire the general effect were it not 
for the crick in his neck that reminds him most forcibly 
that he cannot get far enough away for a proper estimate 
of the proportions. Any city might feel proud to count 
amid its commercial architecture such features as the 
entrance of the Phenix Building, the office of the Amer- 
ican Express Company, and the monumental Field 
Building, by Richardson, with what Mr. Schuyler calls 
its grim utilitarianism of expression ; and the same 
praise might, perhaps, be extended to the Auditorium, 
the Owings Building, the Rookery, and some otliers. 
In non-commercial architecture Chicago may point with 
some pride to its City Hall, its University, its libraries, 
the admirable Chicago Club (the old Art Institute), and 
the new Art Institute on the verge of Lake Michigan. 
Of its churches the less said the better ; their arcliitect- 
ure, regarded as a studied insult to religion, would go 
far to justify the highly uncomplimentary epitliet Mr. 
Stead applied to Chicago. 

In some respects Chicago deserves the name C'ity 
of Contrasts, just as the United States is the Land of 
Contrasts ; and in no way is this more marked than in 
the difference between its business and its residential 
quarters. In the one — height, narrowness, noise, monot- 
ony, dirt, sordid squalor, pretentiousness ; in the other — 
light, space, moderation, homelikeness. The houses in 
the Lake Shore Drive, the Michigan Boulevard, or the. 
Drexel Boulevard are as varied in style as the brown- 
stone mansions of New York are monotonous ; they face 
on parks or are surrounded witli gardens of their own ; 



2o8 The Land of Contrasts 

they are seldom ostentatiously large ; the}^ suggest 
comfort, but not offensive afliuence ; they make credible 
the possession of some individuality of taste on the part 
of their owners. Tlie number of massive round open- 
ings, the strong rusticated masonry, the open loggie, the 
absence of mouldings, and the red-tiled roofs suggest 
to the cognoscenti that Mr. H. H. Richardson's spirit 
was the one which brooded most efficaciously over the 
domestic architecture of Chicago. The two houses I 
saw that were designed by Mr. Richardson himself are 
undoubtedly not so satisfactory as some of his public 
buildings, but they had at least the merit of interest and 
originality ; some of the numerous imitations A\^ere b}^ 
no means successful. 

The parks of Chicago are both large and beautiful. 
They contain not a few very creditable pieces of sculpt- 
ure, among which Mr. St. Gau dens' statue of Lincoln 
is conspicuous as a wonderful triumph of artistic genius 
over unpromising material. The show of flowers in tlie 
parks is not easily paralleled in public domains elsewhere. 
Of these, rather than of its stockyards and its lightning 
rapidity in pig-sticking, will the visitor who Avishes to 
think well of Chicago carry off a mental picture. 

The man who has stood on Inspiration Point above 
Oakland and has watched the lights of San Francisco 
gleaming across its noble bay, or who has gazed down 
on the Golden Gate from the heights of the Presidio, 
must liave an exceptionally rich gallery of memory if he 
does not feel that he has added to its treasures one of 
the most entrancing city views he has ever witnessed. 
The situation of San Francisco is indeed that of an 
empress among cities. Piled tier above tier on the hilly 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 209 

knob at the north end of a long peninsula, it looks down 
on the one side over the roomy waters of San Francisco 
Bay (fifty miles long and ten miles wide), backed by 
the ridge of the Coast Range, while in the other direction 
it is reaching ont across the peninsnla, here six miles 
wide, to the placid expanse of the Pacific Ocean. On 
the north the peninsula ends abruptly in precipitous 
cliffs some hundreds of feet high, while a similar penin- 
sula, stretching southwards, faces it in a similar massive 
promontory, separated by a scant mile of water. This is 
the famous Golden Gate, the super!) gateway leading 
from the ocean to the shelters of the bay. To the south 
the eye loses itself among the fertile valleys of corn and 
fruit stretching away toward the Mexican frontier. 

When we have once sated ourselves with the general 
effect, there still remains a number of details, picturesque, 
interesting, or quaint. There is the Golden Gate Park, 
the cypresses and eucalypti at one end of which testify 
to the balminess of the climate, while the sand-dunes at 
its other end show the original condition of the whole 
surface of the peninsula, and add to our admiration of 
nature a sense of respectful awe for the transforming 
energy of man. Beyond Golden Gate Park we reach 
Sutro Heights, another desert that has been made to 
blossom like the rose. Here we look out over the 
Pacific to the musically named Farralone Islands, thirty 
miles to the west. Then we descend for luncheon to 
the Cliff House below, and watch the uncouth gambols 
of hundreds of fat sea-lions (Spanish lohos marinos')^ 
which, strictly protected from the rifle or harpoon, swim, 
and plunge, and bark unconcernedly within a stone's 
tlirow of the observer. The largest of these animals are 



2IO The Land of Contrasts 



fifteen feet long and weigh ahout a ton ; and it is said 
that certain individuals, recognisable by some peculiarit}-, 
are known to have frequented the rocks for many years. 
On our way hack to tlie lower part of the city we 
use one of the cahle-cars crawling up and down the 
steep inclines like flies on a window-pane ; and we 
find, if the long polished seat of the car be otherwise 
unoccupied, that we have positive difficulty in prevent- 
ing ourselves slipping down from one end of the car to 
the other. By this time the strong afternoon Avind ' has 
set in from the sea, and we notice with surprise that the 
seasoned Friscans, still clad in the muslins and linens 
that seemed suitable enough at high noon, seek by 
preference the open seats of the locomotive car, while 
we, puny visitors, turn up our coat-collars and flee to 
the shelter of the 'trailer" or covered car. As we 
come over " Nob Hill '' we take in the size of the houses 
of the Californian millionaires, note that they are of 
wood (on account of the earthquakes ?), and bemoan the 
misdirected efforts of their architects, who, instead of 
availing themselves of the unique chance of producing 
monuments of characteristically developed timber archi- 
tecture, have known no better than to slavishly imitate 
the incongruous features of stone houses in the style of 

1 It is to this wind, the temperature of which varies little all the year round, 
that San Francisco owes her wonderfully equable' cHraate, which is never 
either too hot or too cold for comfortable work or play. The mean annual 
temperature is about 57° Fahr., or rather higher than that of New York ; but 
while the difference between the mean of the months is 40o at the latter city, 
it is about lOo only at the Golden Gate. The mean of July is about 60o, that 
of January about 50°. September is a shade warmer than July. Observa- 
tions extending over 30 years show that the freezing point on the one hand 
and 80° Fahr. on the other are reached on an average only about half a dozen 
times a year. Tlie hottest day of the year is more likely to occur in Septem- 
ber than any other month. 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 211 

the Renaissance. Indeed, we shall feel that San Fran- 
cisco is badly off for fine buildings of all and every kmd. 
If daylight still allows we may visit the Mission Dolores, 
one of the interesting old Spanish foundations that form 
the origin of so many places in California, and if we are 
historically inclined we may inspect the old Spanish 
grants in the Surveyor-General's office. Those of us 
whose tastes are modern and literary may find our ac- 
count in identifying some of the places in R. L. Steven- 
son's " Ebb Tide," and it will go hard with us if we do not 
also meet a few of his characters amid the cosmopolitan 
crowd in the streets or on the wharves. At night we 
may visit China without the trouble of a voyage, and 
perambulate a city of 25,000 Celestials under the safe 
guidance of an Irish-accented detective. So often have 
the features of Chinatown been described — its incense- 
scented joss-houses, its interminable stage-plays, its 
opium-joints, its drug-stores with their extraordinary 
remedies, its curiosity shops, and its restaurants — that 
no repetition need be attempted here. We leave it with 
a sense of the curious incongruity which allows this 
colony of Orientals to live in the most wide-awake of 
western countries with an apparently almost total 
neglect of such sanitary observances as are held indis- 
pensable in all other modern municipalities. It is cer- 
tain that no more horrible sight could be seen in the 
extreme East than the so-called '' Hermit of Chinatown," 
an insane devotee who has lived for years crouched in a 
miserable little outhouse, subsisting on the offerings of 
the charitable, and degraded almost beyond the pale of 
lunnanity b}^ his unbroken silence, liis blank innnobility, 
and his neglect of all the decencies of life. And this is 



212 The Land of Contrasts 

an American resident, if not an American citizen ! If the 
reader is as lucky as the writer, he may wind up the day 
with a smart shock of earthquake ; and if he is equally 
sleepy and unintelligent (which Heaven forefend !), he 
may miss its keen relish by drowsily wondering what on 
earth they mean by moving that very heavy grand piano 
overhead at that time of night. 

"Two-thirds of them come here to die, and they can't 
do it." This was said by the famous Mr. Barnum about 
Colorado Springs ; and the active life and cheerful man- 
ners of the condemned invalids who flourish in this 
charming little city go far to confirm the truth concealed 
beneath the jest. The land has insensibly sloped up- 
wards since the traveller left the Mississippi behind him, 
and he now finds himself in a flowery prairie 6,000 feet 
above the sea level, while close by one of the finest sec- 
tions of the Rocky Mountains rears its snowy peaks to a 
height of 6,000 to 8,000 feet more. The climate resem- 
bles that of Davos, and like it is preeminently suited for 
all predisposed to or already affected with consumption ; 
but Colorado enjoys more sunshine than its Swiss rival, 
and has no disagreeable period of melting snow. The 
town is sheltered by the foothills, except to tlie south- 
east, where it lies open to the great plains ; and, being 
situated where they meet the mountains, it enjoys the 
openness and free supply of fresh air of the seashore, 
without its dampness. The name is somcAvhat of a 
misnomer, as the nearest springs are those of Manitou, 
about five miles to the north. 

Colorado Springs may be summed up as an oasis of 
Eastern civilisation and finish in an environment of West- 
ern rawness and enterprise. It lias been described as 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 213 

'' a charming big village, like the well-laid-out suburb of 
some large Eastern city." Its wide, tree-shaded streets 
are kept in excellent order. There is a refreshing ab- 
sence of those "loose ends" of a new civilisation which 
even the largest of the Western cities are too apt to 
show. No manufactures are carried on, and no 
" saloons " are permitted. The inhabitants consist very 
largely of educated and refined people from the Eastern 
States and England, whose health does not allow them 
to live in their damper native climes. The tone of the 
place is a refreshing blend of the civilisation of the East 
and the unconventionalism of the West. Perhaps there 
is no pleasanter example of extreme social democracy. 
The young man of the East, unprovided with a private 
income, finds no scope here for his specially trained 
capacities, and is glad to turn an honest penny and 
occupy his time with anything he can get. Thus there 
are gentlemen in the conventional sense of the word 
among many of the so-called humbler callings, and one 
may rub shoulders at the charming little clubs with an 
Oxford-bred livery-stable keeper or a Harvard graduate 
who has turned his energies toward the selling of milk. 
Few visitors to Colorado Springs will fail to carry away 
a grateful and pleasant im})ression of the English doctor 
who has found vigorous life and a prosperous career in 
the place of exile to which his health condemned him in 
early manhood, and who has repaid the place for its gift 
of vitality by the most intelligent and effective champion- 
ship of its advantages. These latter include an excellent 
hotel and a flourishing college for delicate girls and boys. 
Denver, a near neighbour of C-olorado Springs (if we 
speak more Americano)^ is an excellent example, both in 



2 14 The Land of Contrasts 

theory and practice, of the confident expectation of 
growth with which new American cities are founded. 
The necessary public buiklings are not huddled together 
as a nucleus from Avhich the municipal infant may grow 
outwards ; hut a large and generous view is taken of 
the possibilities of expansion. Events do not always 
justify this sanguine spirit of forethought. The capitol 
at Washington still turns its back on the city of which 
it was to be the centre as well as the crown. In a great 
number of cases, however, hope and fact eventually 
meet together. The capitol of Bismarck, chief town of 
North Dakota, was founded in 1883, nearly a mile from 
the city, on a rising site in the midst of the prairie. It 
has already been reached by the advancing tide of 
houses, and will doubtless, in no long time, occupy a 
conveniently central situation. Denver is an equally 
conspicuous instance of the same tendency. The changes 
that took place in that city between the date of my visit 
to it and the reading of the proof-sheets of " Baedeker's 
United States " a year or so later demanded an almost 
entire rewriting of the description. Doubtless it has 
altered at least as much since then, and very likely the 
one or two slightly critical remarks of the handbook of 
1893 are already grossly libellous. Denver quadrupled 
its population between 1880 and 1890. The value of its 
manufactures and of the precious ores smelted here 
reaches a fabulous amount of millions of dollars. The 
usual proportion of " million " and '' two million dollar 
buildings " have been erected. Many of the principal 
streets are (most wonderful of all I) excellently paved 
and kept reasonably clean. But the crowning glor}^ of 
Denver for every intelligent traveller is its magnificent 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 215 

view of the Rocky Mountains, which are seen to the 
West in an unbroken line of at least one hundred and 
fifty miles. Though forty miles distant, they look, owing 
to the purity of the atmosphere, as if they were within a 
walk of two or three hours. Denver is fond of calling 
herself the " Queen City of the Plains," and few will 
grudge the epithet queenly if it is applied to the posses- 
sion of this matchless outlook on the grandest manifesta- 
tions of nature. If the Denver citizen brags more of his 
State Capitol, his Metropole Hotel (no accent, please !), 
and his smelting works than of his snow-piled mountains 
and abysmal cailons, he only follows a natural human 
instinct in estimating most highly that which has cost 
him most trouble. 

Mr. James Bryce has an interesting chapter on the 
absence of a capital in the United States. By capital 
he means '^ a city which is not only the seat of political 
government, but is also by the size, wealth, and character 
of its population the head and centre of the country, a 
leading seat of commerce and industry, a reservoir of 
financial resources, the favoured residence of the great 
and powerful, the spot in which the chiefs of the learned 
professions are to be found, where the most potent and 
widely read journals are published, whither men of 
literary and scientific capacity are drawn." New York 
journalists, with a happy disregard of the historical con- 
notation of language, are pnme to speak of their city as 
a metropolis ; but it is very evident that the most liberal 
interpretation of the word cannot elevate New York to. 
the relative position of such European metropolitan 
cities as Paris or London. Washington, the nominal 
capital of the United States, is perhaps still farther from 



2i6 The Land of Contrasts 

satisfying Mr. Bryce's definition. It certainly is a rela- 
tively small city, and it is not a leading seat of trade, 
manufacture, or finance. It is also true that its journals 
do not rank among the leading papers of the land ; hut, 
on the other hand, it must be remembered that every 
important American journal has its Washington corre- 
spondent, and that in critical times the letters of these 
gentlemen are of very great weight. As the seat of the 
Supreme Judicial Bench of the United States, it has as 
good a claim as any other American city to be the resi- 
dence of the " chiefs of the learned professions ; " and 
it is quite remarkable how, owing to the great national 
collections and departments, it has come to the front as 
the main focus of the scientific interests of the country. 
The Cosmos Club's list of members is alone sufficient to 
illustrate this. Its attraction to men of letters has 
proved less cogent ; but the life of an eminent literary 
man of (say) New Orleans or Boston is much more 
likely to include a prolonged visit to Washington than 
to any other American city not his own. The Library 
of Congress alone, now magnificently housed in an 
elaborately decorated new building, is a strong magnet. 
In the same way there is a growing tendency for all who 
can afford it to spend at least one season in Washing- 
ton. The belle of Kalamazoo or Little Rock is not satis- 
fied till she has made her bow in Washington under the 
wing of her State representative, and the senator is no- 
wise loath to see his wife's tea-parties brightened by a 
bevy of the prettiest girls from his native wilds. Uni- 
versity men throughout the Union, leaders of provincial 
bars, and a host of others have often occasion to visit 
Washington. When we add to all this the army of gov- 



Certain Features of Certain Cities 217 

eriiment employees and the cosmopolitan element of the 
diplomatic corps, we can easily see that, so far as 
" society " is concerned, Washington is more like a 
European capital than any other American city. 
Nothing is more amusing — for a short time, at least — 
than a round of the teas, dinners, receptions, and balls 
of Washington, where the American girl is seen in all 
her glory, with captives of every clime, from the almond- 
eyed Chinaman to the most faultlessly correct Piccadilly 
exquisite, at her dainty feet. I never saw a bevy of more 
beautiful women than officiated at one senatorial after- 
noon tea I visited ; so beautiful were they as to make me 
entirely forget what seemed to my untutored European 
taste the absurdity of their wearing low-necked evening 
gowns while their guests sported hat and jacket and fur. 
The whole tone of Washington society from the Presi- 
dent downward is one of the greatest hospitality and 
geniality towards strangers. The city is beautifully 
laid out, and its plan may be described as that of a 
wheel laid on a gridiron, the rectangular arrangement of 
the streets having superimposed on it a system of radi- 
ating avenues, lined with trees and named for the differ- 
ent States of the Union. The city is governed and 
kept admirably in order by a board of commissioners 
apponited by the President. The sobriquet of " City 
of Magnificent Distances," applied to Washington when 
its framework seemed unnecessarily large for its growth, 
is still deserved, perhaps, for the width of its streets and 
the spaciousness of its parks and squares. The floating 
white dome of the Capitol dominates the entire city, and 
almost every street-vista ends in an imposing public 
building, a mass of luxuriant greenery, or at the least 
a memorial statue, The little wooden houses of the 



2i8 The Land of Contrasts 

coloured squatters that used to alternate freely with the 
statelier mansions of officialdom are now rapidly disap- 
pearing ; and some, perhaps, Avill regret the obliteration 
of the element of picturesqueness suggested in the 
quaint contrast. The absence of the wealth-suggesting 
but artistically somewhat sordid accompaniments of a 
busy industrialism also contributes to Washington's 
position as one of the most singularly handsome cities 
on the globe. Among the other striking features of the 
American capital is the Washington Memorial, a huge 
obelisk raising its metal-tipped apex to a height of five 
hundred and fifty-five feet. There are those who 
consider this a meaningless pile of masonry; but the 
writer sympathises rather with the critics Avho find it, 
in its massive and heaven-reaching simplicity, a fit 
counterpart to the Capitol and one of the noblest monu- 
ments ever raised to mortal man. Wlien gleaming in 
the westering sun, like a slender, tapering, sky-pointing 
finger of gold, no finer index can be imagined to direct 
the gazer to the record of a glorious history. Near the 
monument is the White House, a building which, in its 
modest yet adequate dimensions, embodies the demo- 
cratic ideal more fitly, it may be feared, than certain 
other phases of the Great Republic. Without catalogu- 
ing the other public buildings of Washington, we may 
quit it with a glow of patriotic fervour over the fact that 
the Smithsonian Institute here, one of the most important 
scientific institutions in the world, was founded by an 
Englishman, who, so far as is known, never even visited 
the United States, but left his large fortune for " the 
increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," to the 
care of tliat country with whose generous and popular 
princi[)les he was most in sympathy. 



XII 

Baedekeriana 

THIS cliapter deals with subjects related to the 
tourist and the guidebook, and with certain 
points of a more personal nature connected 
with the preparation of " Baedeker's Handbook 
to the United States." Readers uninterested in topics 
of so practical and commonplace a character will do well 
to skip it altogether. 

Wlien the scheme of publishing a '' Baedeker " to the 
United States was originally entertained, the first thought 
was to invite an American to write the book for us. On 
more mature deliberation it was, however, decided that 
a member of our regular staff Avould, perhaps, do the 
work equally well, inasmuch as he would combine, with 
actual experience in the art of guidebook making, the 
stranger's point of view, and thus the more acutely 
realise, by experiment in liis own corpus vile, the points 
on which the ignorant European would require advice, 
warning, or assistance. So far as my own voice had 
aught to do with this decision, I have to confess that I 
severely grudged the interesting task to an outsider. 
The opportunity of making a somewhat extensive survey 
of the country that stood preeminently for the modern 
ideas of democracy and progress was a peculiarly grate- 
ful one ; and I even contrived to infuse (for my own 
consumption) a spice of the ideal into the homely brew 

219 



220 The Land of Contrasts 

of the guidebook by reflecting that it woukl contribute 
(so far as it went) to that mutual knowledge, intimacy 
of which is perhaps all that is necessary to ensure true 
friendship between the two great Anglo-Saxon powers. 

While thus reserving the editing of the book for one 
of our own household, Ave realised thoroughly that no 
approach to completeness would be attainable without 
the cooperation of the Americans themselves ; and I 
welcome this opportunity to reiterate my keen apprecia- 
tion of the open-handed and open-minded way in which 
this was accorded. Besides the signed articles by men 
of letters and science in the introductory part of the 
handbook, T liave to acknowledge thousands of other 
kindly offices and useful hints, many of which liardly 
allow themselves to be classified or defined, but all of 
which had their share in producing aught of good tliat 
tlie volume may contain. So .many Americans liave 
used their Baedekers in Europe that T found troops of 
ready-made sympathisers, wlio, half-interested, half- 
amused, at the attempt to Baedekerise their own con- 
tinent, knew pretty well what was wanted, and were 
al)le to put me on the right track for procuring informa- 
tion. Indeed, tlie book could hardly have been written 
but for these innumerable streams of disinterested assist- 
ance, which enabled the writer so to economise his time 
as to finish his task before the part first written was en- 
tirely obsolete. 

The process of change in the United States goes on so 
rapidly that the attempt of a guidebook to keep abreast 
of the times (not easy in any country) becomes almost 
futile. The speed with Avhich Denver metamorphosed 
her outward appearance has already been commented on 



Baedekeriana 221 



at page 214 ; and this is but one instance in a thousand. 
Towns spring up literally in a night. McGregor in 
Texas, at the junction of two new railways, had twelve 
liouses the day after it was fixed upon as a town site, 
and in two months contained five hundred souls. Towns 
may also disappear in a night, as Johnstown (Penn.) 
was swept away by the bursting of a dam on May 31, 
1889, or as Chicago was destroyed by the great fire of 
1871. These are simply exaggerated examples of what 
is happening less obtrusively all the time. The means 
of access to points of interest are constantly changing ; 
the rough horse-trail of to-day becomes the stage-road of 
to-morrow and the railway of the day after. The con- 
servative clinging to the old, so common in Europe, has 
no place in the New World ; an apparently infinitesimal 
advantage will occasion a houleversement that is by no 
means infinitesimal. 

Next to the interest and beauty of the places to be 
visited, perhaps the two things in which a visitor to a 
new country has most concern are the means of moving 
from ponit to point and the accommodation provided 
for him at his nightly stopping-places — in brief, its con- 
veyances and its inns. During the year or more I spent 
in almost continuous travelling in the United States I 
had abundant opportunity of testing both of these. In 
all I must have slept in over two hundred different beds, 
ranging from one in a hotel-chamber so gorgeous that it 
seemed almost as indelicate to go to bed in it as to un- 
dress in the drawing-room, down through the berths of 
Pullman cars and river steamboats, to an open-air couch 
of balsam boughs in the Adirondack forests. My means 
of locomotion included a safety bicycle, an Adirondack 



22 2 The Land of Contrasts 

canoe, the back of a horse, the omnipresent buggy, a 
bob-sleigh, a "cutter," a "booby," four-horse "stages," 
river. Lake, and sea-going steamers, horse-cars, cable-cars, 
electric cars, mountain elevators, narrow-gauge railways, 
and the Vestibuled Limited Express from New York to 
Chicago. 

Perhaps it is significant of the amount of truth in 
many of the assertions made about travelling in the 
United States that I traversed about 35,000 miles in 
the various ways indicated above without a scratch and 
almost without serious detention or delay. Once we 
were nearly swamped in a sudden squall in a mountain 
lake, and once we had a minute or two's pleasant expe- 
rience of the iron-shod heels of our horse inside the 
buggy, the unfortunate animal having hitched his hind- 
legs over the dash-board and nearly kicking out our 
brains in his frantic efforts to get free. These, however, 
were accidents that might have happened anywhere, and 
if my experiences by road and rail in America prove 
anything, they prove that travelling in the United 
States is just as safe as in Europe.^ Some varieties of 
it are rougher than anything of the kind I know in the 
Old World ; but on the other hand much of it is far 
pleasanter. The European system of small railway 
compartments, in spite of its advantage of privacy and 
quiet, would be simply unendurable in the long journeys 
that have to be made in the Avestern hemisphere. The 

1 Lady Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster, in her book, 
" A Round Trip in North America," bears Ihe same testimony : " Over eleven 
thousand miles of railway travelling and miles untold of driving besides, with- 
out an accident or a semblance of one. No contretemps of any kind, except 
the little delay at Hope from the 'washout,' which did not matter the least; 
lovely weather, and Uiiiversal kindness and courtesy from man, woman, and 
child." 



Baedekeriana 223 



journey of twenty-four to thirty hours from New York to 
Chicago, if made by the Vestibuled Limited, is probably 
less fatiguing than the day-journey of half the time from 
London to Edinburgh. The comforts of this su[)erl) 
train include those of the drawing-room, the dining- 
room, the smoking-room, and the library. These apart- 
ments are perfectly ventilated by compressed air and 
lighted by movable electric lights, while in winter they 
are warmed to an agreeable temperature by steam-pipes. 
Card-tables and a selection of the daily papers minister 
to the traveller's amusement, while bulletin boards give 
the latest Stock Exchange quotations and the reports of 
the Government Weather Bureau. Those who desire it 
may enjoy a bath en route, or avail themselves of the 
services of a lady's maid, a barber, a stenographer, and 
a type-writer. There is even a small and carefully 
selected medicine chest within reach; and the way in 
which the minor delicacies of life are consulted may be 
illustrated by the fact that powdered soap is provided in 
the lavatories, so that no one may have to use the same 
cake of soap as his neighbour. 

No one who has not tried both can appreciate the 
immense difference in comfort given by the opportunity 
to move a})Out in the train. No matter how pleasant 
one's companions are in an English first-class compart- 
ment, their eyiforced proximity makes one heartily sick 
of them before many hours have elapsed ; while a con- 
versation with Daisy Miller in the American parlour car 
is rendered doubly delightful by the consciousness that 
you may at any moment transfer yourself and your hons 
mots to Lydia Blood at the other end of the car, or retire 
with Gilead P. Beck to the snug little smoking-room. 



224 The Land of Contrasts 

The great size and weight of the American cars nmke 
them very steady on well-laid tracks like those of the 
Pennsylvania Railway, and thus letter-writing need not 
he a lost art on a railway journey. Even when the per- 
manent way is inferior, the same cause often makes the 
vibration less tlian on the admirable road-beds of Eng- 
land. 

Theoretically, there is no distinction of classes on an 
American railway; practically, there is whenever the 
line is important enough or the journey long enough to 
make it worth while. The parlour car corresponds to our 
first class ; and its use has this advantage (rather curious 
in a democratic country), that the increased fare for its 
admirable comforts is relatively very low, usually (in 
my experience) not exceeding ^d. a mile. The ordinary 
fare from New York to Boston (220 to 250 miles) is $,^ 
(XI) ; a seat in a parlour car costs |1 (4s.), and a sleeping- 
berth $1.50 (6.§.). Thus the ordinary passenger pays at 
the rate of about lid. per mile, while the luxury of the 
Pullman may be obtained for an additional expenditure 
of just about id. a mile. The extra fare on even the 
Chicago Vestibuled Limited is only 18 (32s.) for 912 
miles, or considerably less than ^d. a mile. These rates 
are not only less than the difference between first-class 
and third-class fares in Europe, but also compare very 
advantageously with the rates for sleeping-berths on 
European lines, being usually 50 to 75 per cent, lower. 
The parlour-car rates, however, increase considerably as 
we go on towards the West and get into regions where 
competition is less active. A good instance of this is 
afforded by the parlour-car fares of the Canadian Pacific 
Railway, which T select because it spans the continent 



Baedekeriana 225 



with its own rails from the Atlantic to the Pacific ; the 
principle on the United States lines is similar. The 
price of a '' sleeper " ticket from Montreal to Fort Will- 
iam (998 miles) is $6, or about |(7. per mile ; that from 
Banff to Vancouver (560 miles) is the same, or at the 
rate of about {^d. per mile. The rate for the whole 
journey from Halifax to Vancouver (3,362 miles) is 
about f(7. per mile. 

Travellers who prefer the privacy of the European 
system may combine it with the liberty of the American 
system by hiring, at a small extra rate, the so-called 
'' drawing-room " or " state-room," a small compartment 
containing four seats or berths, divided by partitions 
from the rest of the parlour car. The ordinary carriage or 
"day coach " corresponds to the English second-class car- 
riage, or, rather, to the excellent third-class carriages on 
such railways as the Midland. It does not, I think, excel 
them in comfort except in the greater size, the greater 
liberty of motion, and the element of variety afforded by 
the greater number of fellow-passengers. The seats are 
disposed on each side of a narrow central aisle, and are 
so arranged that the occupants can ride forward or back- 
ward as they prefer. Each seat holds two persons, but 
with some difficulty if either has any amplitude of bulk. 
The space for the legs is also very limited. The chief 
discomfort, however, is the fact that there is no support 
for the head and shoulders, though this disability might 
be easily remedied by a movable head-rest. Very little 
provision is made for hand luggage, the American cus- 
tom being to "check"' anything checkable and have it 
put in the " baggage car." Rugs are entirely superflu- 
ous, as the cars are far more likely to be too warm than 



226 The Land of Contrasts 

too cold. The windows are usually another w^eak point. 
They move vertically as ours do, but up instead of down ; 
and they are frequently made so that they cannot be 
opened more than a few inches. The handles by which 
they are lifted are very small, and afford very little pur- 
chase ; and the windows are frequently so stiff that it 
requires a strong man to move them. I have often seen 
half a dozen passengers struggle in vain with a refrac- 
tory glass, and finally have to call in the help of the 
brawny brakeman. This difficulty, however, is of less 
consequence from the fact that even if you can open 
your window, there is sure to be some one among your 
forty or fifty fellow-passengers who objects to the 
draught. Or if you object to the draught of a window 
in front of you, jo\x have either to grin and bear it or 
do violence to your British diffidence in requesting its 
closure. The windows are all furnished with small 
slatted blinds, which can be arranged in hot weather so 
as to exclude the sun and let in the air. The conductor 
communicates with the engine-driver by a bell-cord sus- 
pended from the roof of the carriages and running 
throughout the entire length of the train. It is well to 
remember that this tempting clothes-rope is not meant 
for hanging up one's overcoat. Whatever be the reason, 
the plague of cinders from the locomotive smoke is often 
much worse in America than in England. As we pro- 
ceed, they patter on tlie roof like hailstones, in a way 
that is often very trying to the nerves, and they not un- 
frequently make open windows a doubtful blessing, even 
on immoderately warm days. At intervals the brake- 
man carries round a pitcher of iced water, which he 
serves gratis to all who want it; and it is a pleasant 



Baedekeriana 



227 



sight on sultry summer days to see how the children 
welcome his coming. In some cases there is a perma- 
nent filter of ice-water with a tap in a corner of the car. 
At each end of the car is a lavatory, one for men and 
one for women. In spite, then, of the discomforts noted 
above, it may be asserted that the poor man is more com- 
fortable on a long journey than in Europe ; and that on 
a short journey the American system affords more enter- 
tainment than the European. When Richard Grant 
White announced his preference for the English system 
because it preserves the traveller's individuality, looks 
after his personal comfort, and carries all his baggage, 
he must have forgotten that it is practically first-class 
passengers only who reap the benefit of those advantages. 

One most unpleasantly suggestive equipment of an 
American railway carriage is the axe and crowbar sus- 
pended on the wall for use in an accident. This makes 
one reflect that there are only two doors in an American 
car containing sixty people, whereas the same number 
of passengers in Europe'AVOuld have six, eight, or even 
ten. This is extremely inconvenient in crowded trains 
(e.^., in the New York Elevated), and might conceivably 
add immensely to the horrors of an accident. The latter 
reflection is emphasised by the fact that there are practi- 
cally no soft places to fall on, sharp angles presenting 
themselves on every side, and the very arm-rests of the 
seats being made of polished iron. 

There is always a smoking-car attached to the train, 
generally immediately after the locomotive or luggage 
van. Labourers in their working clothes and the 
shabbily clad in general are apt to select this car, whicli 
thus practically takes the place of third-class carriages 



2 28 The Land of Contrasts 

on European railways. On the long-distance trains 
running to the West there are emigrant cars which also 
represent our third-class cars, while the same function 
is performed in the South by the cars reserved for 
coloured passengers. In a few instances the trains are 
made up of first-class and second-class carriages actually 
so named. A " first-class ticket," however, in ordinary 
language means one for the universal day-coach as above 
described. 

The ticket system differs somewhat from that in vogue 
in Europe, and rather curious developments have been 
the result. For short journeys the ticket often resembles 
the small oblong of pasteboard with which we are all 
familiar. For longer journeys it consists of a narrow 
strip of coupons, sometimes nearly two feet in length. 
If this is '^ unlimited " it is available at any time until 
used, and the holder may " stop over " at any interme- 
diate station. The " limited " and cheaper ticket is 
available for a continuous passage onl}', and does not 
allow of any stoppages en route. The coupons are col- 
lected in the cars by the conductors in charge of the 
various sections of the line. The skill shown by these 
officials, passing through a long and crowded train after 
a stoppage, in recognising the newcomers and asking for 
their tickets, is often very remarkable. Sometimes the 
conductor gives a coloured counter-check to enable him 
to recognise the sheep Avhom he has already shorn. 
These checks are generally placed in the hat-band or 
stuck in the back of the seat. The conductor collects 
them just before he hands over the train to the charge 
of his successor. As many complaints are made by 
English travellers of the incivility of American con- 



Baedekeriana 229 



ductors, T may say that the first conductor I met found 
me, when he was on his rounds to collect his counter- 
checks, lolling back on my seat, with my hat high above 
me in the rack. I made a motion as if to get up for it, 
when he said, '' Pray don't disturb yourself, sir ; I'll 
reach up for it." Not all the conductors I met after- 
wards were as polite as this, but he has as good a right 
to pose as the type of American conductor as the over- 
bearing ruffians who stalk through the books of sundry 
British tourists. In judging him it should be remem- 
bered that he democratically feels himself on a level 
with his passengers, that he would be insulted by the 
offer of a tip, that he is harassed all day long by hun- 
dreds of foolish questions from foolish travellers, that 
he has a great deal to do in a limited time, and that 
however " short " he may be with a male passenger he 
is almost invariably courteous and considerate to the 
unprotected female. Though his address may some- 
times sound rather familiar, he means no disrespect ; and 
if he takes a fancy to you and offers you a cigar, you 
need not feel insulted, and will probably find he smokes 
a better brand than your own. 

A feature connected with the American railway 
system that should not be overlooked is the mass of 
literature prepared by the railway companies and dis- 
tributed gratis to their passengers. The illustrated 
pamphlets issued by the larger companies are marvels of 
paper and typography, with really charming illustrations 
and a text that is often clever and witty enough to 
suggest that authors of repute are sometimes tempted to 
lend their anonymous pens for this kind of Avork. But 
even the tiniest little "one-horse" railway distributes 



230 The Land of Contrasts 

neat little '' folders," showing conclusively that its 
tracks lead through the Elysian Fields and end at tlie 
Garden of Eden. A conspicuous feature in all hotel 
offices is a large rack containing packages of these gaily 
coloured folders, contrihuted hy perhaps fifty different 
railways for the use of the hotel guests. 

Owing to the unlimited time for which tickets are 
available, and to other causes, a race of dealers in rail- 
wa}' tickets has sprung up, who rejoice in the euphonious 
name of '' scalpers," and often do a roaring trade in sell- 
ing tickets at less than regular fares. Thus, if the fare 
from .\ to B be $10 and the return fare |15, it is often 
possible to obtain the half of a return ticket from a 
scalper for about -18. Or a man setting out for a journey 
of 100 miles buys a through ticket to the terminus of 
the line, which may be 400 miles distant. On tliis 
through ticket he pays a proportionally lower rate for 
the distance he actually travels, and sells the balance of 
his ticket to a scalper. Or if a man wishes to go from 
A to B and finds that a special excursion ticket there 
and back is being sold at a single fare (-$10), he may use 
the half of this ticket and sell the other half to a 
scalper in B. It is obvious that anything he can get 
for it will be a gain to him, while the scalper could 
afford to give up to about $7 for it, though he probably 
will not give more than 14. The profession of scalper 
may, however, very probably prove an evanescent one, 
as vigorous efforts are being made to suppress him by 
legislative enactment. 

Americans often claim that the ordinary railway-fare 
in the United States is less than in England, amounting 
only to 2 cents (l^i) per mile. My experience, how- 



Baeclekeriana ^3 1 



ever, leads me to say that this assertion cannot be 
accepted without considerable deduction. It is true 
that in many States (including all the Eastern ones) 
there is a statutory fare of 2 cents per mile, but this 
(so far as I know) is not always granted for ordinary 
single or double tickets, but only on season, " commuta- 
tion," or mileage tickets. The " commutation " tickets 
are good for a certain number of trips. The mileage 
tickets are books of small coupons, each of which repre- 
sents a mile ; the conductor tears out as many coupons 
as the passenger has travelled miles. This mileage 
system is an extremely convenient one for (say) a 
family, as the books ai'e good until exhausted, and the 
coupons are available on any train (with possibly one or 
two exceptions) on any part of the system of the com- 
pany issuing the ticket. Which of our enlightened 
British companies is going to be the first to win the 
hearts of its patrons by the adoption of this neat and 
easy device? Out West and down South the fares foi* 
ordinary tickets purchased at the station are often much 
higher than 2 cents a mile ; on one short and very 
inferior line I traversed the rate was 7 cents (3.^ti) per 
mile. I find that Mr. W. M. Ac worth calculates the 
average fare in the United States as l^d. per mile as 
against l^d. in Great Britain. Professor Hadley, an 
American authority, gives the rates as 2.35 cents and 2 
cents respectively. 

British critics would, perhaps, be more lenient in their 
animadversions on American railways, if they would 
more persistently bear in mind the great difference in the 
conditions under which railways have been constructed 
in the Old and the New World. In England, for example. 



232 The Land of Contrasts 

tlie railway came after the thick settlement of a district, 
and has naturally had to pay dearly for its privileges, and 
to suhmit to stringent conditions in regard to construc- 
tion and maintenance. In the United States, on the 
other hand, the railways were often the first roads (hence 
railroad is the American name for them) in a new dis- 
trict, the inhabitants of which were glad to get them on 
almost any terms. Hence the cheap and provisional 
nature of many of the lines, and the numerous deadly 
level crossings. The land grants and other privileges 
accorded to the railway companies may be fairly com- 
pared to the road tax which we willingly submit to in 
England as the just price of an invaluable boon. This 
reflection, however, need not be carried so far as to cover 
with a mantle of justice all the railway concessions of 
America ! 

Two things in the American parlour-car system struck 
me as evils that were not only unnecessary, but easily 
avoidable. The first of these is that most illiberal regu- 
lation which compels the porter to let down the upper 
berth even when it is not occupied. The object of this 
is apparently to induce the occupant of the lower berth 
to hire the whole " section " of two berths, so as to have 
more ventilation and more room for dressing and un- 
dressing. Presumably the parlour-car companies know 
their own business best ; but it would seem to the aver- 
age '' Britisher " that such a petty spirit of annoyance 
would be likely to do more harm than good, even in a 
financial Avay. The custom would be more excusable if 
it Avere confined to those cases in which two people 
shared the lower berth. The custom is so unlike the 
usual spirit of the United States, where the practice is 



Baedekeriana 233 



to charge a liberal round sum and tlien relieve you of all 
minor annoyances and exactions, that its persistence is 
somewhat of a mystery. 

The continuance of the other evil I allude to is still 
less comprehensible. The United States is proverbially 
the paradise of what it is, perhaps, now behind the times 
to term the gentler sex. The path of woman, old or new, 
in America is made smooth in all directions, and as a 
rule she has tlie best of the accommodation and the lion's 
share of the attention wherever she goes. But this is 
emphatically not the case on the parlour car. No attempt 
is made there to divide the sexes or to respect the privacy 
of a lady. If there are twelve men and four women on 
the car, the latter are not grouped by themselves, but 
are scattered among the men, either in lower or upper 
berths, as the number of their tickets or the courtesy of 
the men dictates. The lavatory and dressing-room for 
men at one end of the car has two or more '^ set bowls " 
(tixed in basins), and can be used by several dressers at 
once. The parallel accommodation for ladies barely 
holds one, and its door is provided with a lock, which 
enables a selfish bang-frizzier and rouge-layer to occupy 
it for an hour wliile a queue of her unhappy sisters 
remains outside. It is difficult to see why a small por- 
tion at one end of the car should not be reserved for 
ladies, and separated at night from the rest of the car by 
a curtain across the central aisle. Of course the passage 
of the railway officials could not be hindered, but the 
masculine passengers might very well be confined for 
the night to entrance and egress at their own end of the 
car. An improvement in the toilette accommodation for 
ladies also seems a not unreasonable demand. 



234 



The Land of Contrasts 



Miss Catherine Bates, in her '' Year in the Oreat 
RepuhUc," narrates the case of a man who was nearly 
snffocated by the fact that a slight collision jari-ed the 
lid of the top berth in which he was sleeping and snapped 
it to ! This story may be trne ; bnt in the only top 
berths which I know the occupant lies upon the lid, 
which, to close, would have to spring upwards against 
his weight ! 

A third nuisance, or combination of benefit and nui- 
sance, or benefit with a very stroiig dash of avoidal)le 
nuisance, is the train boy. This young gentleman, 
whose age varies from fifteen to fifty, though usually 
nearer the former than the latter, is one of the most 
conspicuous of the embryo forms of the great American 
speculator or merchant. He occupies Avith his stock in 
trade a corner in the baggage car or end carriage of the 
train, and makes periodical rounds throughout the cars, 
offerino- his wares for sale. These are of the most vari- 
ous description, ranging from the daily papers and cur- 
rent periodicals through detective stories and tales of 
the Wild West, to chewing-gum, pencils, candy, bananas, 
skull-caps, fans, tobacco, and cigars. His pleasing way 
is to perambulate the cars, leaving sami)les of his wares 
on all the seats and afterwards calling for orders. He 
does this with supreme indifference to the occupation of 
the passenger. Thus, you settle yourself comfortably 
for a nap, and are just succumbing to the drowsy god, 
when you feel yourself " taken in the abdomen," not 
(fortunately) by " a chunk of okl red sandstone," but 
by the latest number of the Illustrated American or 
Scrihiers Monthly. The rounds are so frequent that 
the door of the car never seems to cease banging or the 



Baedekeriana 235 



cold draughts to cease blowing in on your bald head. 
Mr. Phil Robinson makes the very sensible suggestion 
that the train boy should have a little printed list of his 
wares which he could distribute throughout the train, 
whereupon the traveller could send for him when 
wanted. Another suggestion that I venture to present 
to this independent young trader is that he should pro- 
vide himself with copies of the novels treating of the 
districts wdiich the railway traverses. Thus, when I 
tried to procure from him " Ramona " in California, or 
" The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains " in 
Tennessee, or " The Hoosier Schoolmaster " in Ohio, or 
" The Grandissimes " near New Orleans, the nearest he 
could come to my modest demand was " The Kreutzer 
Sonata " or the last effort of Miss Laura Jean Libbey, a 
popuhir American novelist, who describes in glowing 
colours how two aristocratic Englishmen, fighting a duel 
near London somewhere in the seventies, were inter- 
rupted by the heroine, who drove between them in a 
hansom and pair and received the shots in its panels ! 
Out West, too, he could probably put more money in 
his pocket if he were disposed to put his pride there too. 
One pert youth in Arizona preferred to lose my order 
for cigars rather than bring the box to me for selection ; 
lie said " he'd be darned if he'd sling boxes around for 
me ; I could come and choose for myself." However, 
when criticism has been exhausted it is an undeniable 
fact that the American Pullman cars are more comfort- 
able and considerably cheaper than the so-called compartir 
ments de luxe of European railways. 

It is, perhaps, worth noting that the comfort of the 
engine-driver, or engineer as he is called llm/ud Ameri- 



236 The Land of Contrasts 

canct^ is much better catered for in the United States 
than in England. His cab is protected both overhead 
and at the sides, while his bull's-eye window permits 
1dm to look ahead without receiving the wind, dust, and 
snow in his eyes. The curious P^nglish conservatism 
which, apparently, believes that a driver will do his work 
better because exposed to almost the full violence of the 
elements always excites a very natural surprise in the 
American visitor to our shores. 

The speed of American trains is as a rule slower than 
that of English ones, though there are some brilliant 
exceptions to this rule. I never remember dawdling 
along in so slow and apparently purposeless a manner 
as in crossing the arid deserts of Arizona — unless, 
indeed, it was in travelling by the Manchester and Mil- 
ford line in Wales. The train on the branch betAveen 
Raymond (a starting-point for the Yoseniite) and the 
n>ain line went so cannily that the engine-driver (an 
excellent marksman) shot rabbits from the engine, while 
the fireman jumped down, picked them up, and 
clambered on again at the end of the train. The only 
time the train had to be stopped for him Avas when the 
engineer had a successful right and left, the victims of 
which expired at some distance from each other. It 
should be said that there was absolutely no reason to 
hurry on this trip, as we had " lashins " of time to spare 
for our connection at the junction, and the passengers 
were all much interested in the sport. 

At the other end of the scale are the trains which run 
from New York to Philadelphia (90 miles) in two hours, 
the train of the Reading Railway that makes the run 
of bb miles from Camden to Atlantic City in 52 minutes, 



Baedekeriana 



237 



and the Empire State P^xpress which runs from New 
York to Buffalo (436 J miles) at the rate of over 50 
miles an hour, including stops. These, however, are 
exceptional, and the traveller may find that trains known 
as the " Greased Lightning," " Cannon Ball," or " G- 
Whizz " do not exceed (if they even attain) 40 miles an 
hour. The possibility of speed on an American railway 
is shown ])y the record run of 436^ miles in (3| hours, 
made on the New York Central Railroad in 1895 
(= 64.22 miles per hour, exclusive of stops), and by the 
run of 148.8 miles in 137 minutes, made on the same 
railway in 1897. The longest unbroken runs of regular 
trains are one of 146 miles on the Chicago Limited train 
on the Pennsylvania route, and one of 143 miles by the 
New York Central Railway running up the Hudson to 
Albany. As experts will at once recognise, these are 
feats which compare well with anything done on this 
side of the Atlantic. 

In the matter of accidents the comparison with Great 
Britain is not so overwhelmingly unfavourable as is some- 
times supposed. If, indeed, we accept the figures given 
by Mullhall in his " Dictionary of Statistics," we have 
to admit that the proportion of accidents is five times 
greater in the United States than in the United King- 
dom. The statistics collected by the Railroad Commis- 
sioners of Massachusetts, however, reduce this ratio to 
five to four. The safety of railway travelling differs 
hugely in different parts of the country. Thus Mr. E. 
B. Dorsey shows ('' English and American Railways 
Compared ") that the average number of miles a pas- 
senger can travel in Massachusetts without being killed 
is 503,568,188, while in the United Kingdom the num- 



238 The Land of Contrasts 

ber is only 172,965,362, leaving a very comfortable 
margin of over 300,000,000 miles. On the whole, how- 
ever, it cannot be denied that there are more accidents 
in American railway travelling than in Enropean, and 
very many of them from easily preventable causes. 
The whole spirit of the American continent in such 
matters is more '' casual '' than that of Europe ; the 
American is more willing to "chance it;" the patri- 
archal regime is replaced by the every-man-for-himself- 
and-devil-take-the-hindmost system. When I hired a 
horse to ride up a somewhat giddy path to the top of a 
mountain, I was supplied (without warning) with a young 
animal that had just arrived from the breeding farm and 
liad never even seen a mountain. Many and curious, 
when I regained my hotel, were the enquiries as to how 
he had beliaved himself ; and it was no thanks to them 
that I could report that, though rather frisky on the 
road, he had sobered down in the most sagacious man- 
ner when we struck the narrow upward trail. In 
America the railway passenger has to look out for him- 
self. There is no checking of tickets before starting to 
obviate the risk of being in the wrong train. There is 
no porter to carry the traveller's hand-baggage and see 
him comfortably ensconced' in the right carriage. When 
the train does start, it glides away silently without any 
warning bell, and it is easy for an inadvertent traveller 
to be left behind. Even in large and important stations 
there is often no clear demarcation between the plat- 
forms and the permanent Ava}^ The whole floor of the 
station is on one level, and the rails are flush with the 
spot from which you climb into the car. Overhead 
bridges or subways are practicall}^ unknown ; and the 



Baedekeriana 239 



arriving passenger has often to cross several lines of rails 
before reaching shore. The level crossing is, perhaps, 
inevitable at the present stage of railroad development 
in the United States, but its annual butcher's bill is so 
huge that one cannot help feeling it might be better 
safeguarded. Richard Grant White tells how he said to 
the station-master at a small wayside station in England, 
a propos of an overhead footbridge : " Ah, I suppose 
you had an accident through someone crossing tlie line, 
and then erected that ? " '' Oh, no," was the reply, " we 
don't wait for an accident." Mr. White makes the com- 
ment, '' The trouble in America 's that we do wait for the 
accident." 

When I left England in September, 1888, we sailed 
down the Mersey on one of those absolutely perfect 
autumn days, the very memory of which is a continual 
joy. I remarked on the beauty of the weather to an 
American fellow-passenger. He replied, half in fun, 
^' Yes, this is good enough for England ; but wait till 
you see our American weather ! " As luck would have 
it, it was raining heavily when we steamed up New 
York harbour, and the fog was so dense that we could 
not see the statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, 
tliough we passed close under it. The same American 
passenger had expatiated to me during the voyage on 
the merits of the American express service. " You have 
no trouble with porters and cabs, as in the Old World ; 
you simply point out your trunks to an express agent, 
give him your address, take his receipt, and you will 
probably find your trunks at the house when you 
arrive." We reached New York on a Saturday ; I con- 
fidently handed over my trunk to a representative of 



240 The Land of Contrasts 

the Transfer Company al)out 9 A.M., hied to my friend's 
house in Brooklyn, and saw and heard nothing more of 
my trunk till Monday morning! 

Such was the way in which two of my most cherished 
heliefs about America were dissipated almost before I 
set foot upon her free and sacred soil ! It is, however, 
only fair to say that if I had assumed these experiences 
to be really characteristic, I should have made a grievous 
mistake. It is true that I afterwards experienced a 
good many stormy days in the United States, and found 
that the predominant weather in all parts of the country 
was, to judge from my apologetic hosts, the ''excep- 
tional ; " but none the less I revelled in the bright blue, 
clear, sunny days with which America is so abundantly 
blessed, and came to sympathise very deeply with the 
depression that sometimes overtakes the American exile 
during his sojourn on our fog-bound coasts. So, too, I 
found the express system on the whole what our friend 
Artemus Ward calls " a sweet boon." Certainly it is 
as a rule necessary, in starting from a private house, to 
have one's luggage ready an hour or so before one starts 
one's self, and this is hardly so convenient as a hansom 
with 3'ou inside and your portmanteau on top ; and 
it is also true that there is sometimes (especially in 
New York) a certain delay in the delivery of one's 
belongings. In nine cases out of ten, however, it 
was a great relief to get rid of the trouble of taking 
your luggage to or from the station, and feel youi- 
self free to meet it at your own time and will. It 
was not often that I was reduced to such straits as 
on one occasion in Brooklyn, when, at the last moment, 
I had to charter a green-grocer's van and drive down 



Baedekeriana 241 



to the station in it, triumphantly seated on my port- 
manteau. 

The check system on the railway itself deserves 
almost unmitigated praise, and only needs to be under- 
stood to be appreciated. On arrival at the station the 
traveller hands over his impedimenta to the baggage 
master, who fastens a small metal disk, bearing the 
destination and a number, to each package, and gives the 
owner a duplicate check. The railway company then 
becomes responsible for the luggage, and holds it until 
reclaimed by presentation of the duplicate check. This 
system avoids on the one hand the chance of loss and 
trouble in claiming characteristic of the British system, 
and on the other tlie waste of time and expense of the 
Continental system of printed paper tickets. On arrival 
at his destination the traveller may hurry to his hotel 
without a moment's delay, after handing his check either 
to the hotel porter or to the so-called transfer agent, 
who usually passes through the train as it reaches an 
important station, undertaking the delivery of trunks 
and giving receipts in exchange for checks. 

Besides the city express or transfer companies, the 
chief duty of which is to convey luggage from the 
traveller's residence to the railway station or vice versa, 
there are also the large general express companies or 
carriers, which send articles all over the United States. 
One of the most characteristic of these is the Adams 
Express Company, the Avidely known name of which has 
originated a popular conundrum with the query, " Why 
was Eve created?" This company began in 1840 with 
tAvo men, a boy, and a wheelbarrow ; now it employs 
8,000 men and 2,000 wagons, and carries parcels over 



242 The Land of Contrasts 

25,000 miles of railway. The Wells, Fargo & Company 
Express operates over 40,000 miles of railway. 

Coaching in America is, as a rule, anything but a 
pleasure. It is true that the chance of being held up 
by " road agents " is to-day practically non-existent, and 
that the spectacle of a crowd of yelling Apaches making 
a stage-coach the pin-cushion for their arrows is now to 
be seen nowhere but in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. 
But the roads I No European who has done much driv- 
ing in the United States can doubt for one moment that 
the required Man of the Hour is General Wade.^ Even 
in the State of New York I have been in a stage that 
was temporarily checked by a hole two feet deep in the 
centre of the road, and that had to be emptied and held 
up while passing another part of the same road. In Vir- 
ginia I drove over a road, leading to one of the most fre- 
quented resorts of the State, which it is simple truth to 
state offered worse going than any ordinary ploughed 
field. The wheels were often almost entirely submerged 
in liquid mud, and it is still a mystery to me how the 
tackle held together. To be jolted off one's seat so vio- 
lently as to strike the top of the carriage was not a 
unique experience. Nor was the spending of ten hours 
in making thirty miles with four horses. In the Yellow- 
stone one of the coaches of our party settled down in 
the midst of a slough of despond on the highway, from 
which it was finally extricated backwards by the com- 
bined efforts of twelve horses borrowed from the other 
coaches. Misery makes strange bedfellows, and the 
ingredients of a C-hristmas pudding are not more thor- 

1 " Had you seen but these roads before they were made, 
You would hold up your hands and bless General Wade." 



Baedekeriana 243 



ouglily shaken together or more inextricably mingled 
than stage-coach passengers in America are. apt to be. 
The difficulties of the roads have developed the skill, 
courage, and readiness of the stage-coach men to an 
extraordinary degree, and I have never seen bolder or 
more dexterous driving than when California Bill or 
Colorado Jack rushed his team of four young horses 
down the breakneck slopes of these terrible highways. 
After one particularly hair-raising descent the driver 
condescended to explain that he was afraid to come down 
more slowly, lest the hind wheels should skid on the 
smooth rocky outcrop in the road and swing the vehicle 
sideways into the abyss. In coming out of the Yosemite, 
owing to some disturbance of the ordinary traffic arrange- 
ments our coach met the incoming stage at a part of the 
road so narrow that it seemed absolutely impossible for 
the two to pass each other. On the one side was a 
yawning precipice, on tlie other the mountain rose steeply 
from the roadside. The off-wheels of the incoming coacli 
were tilted up on the hillside as far as they could be 
without an upset. In vain ; our hubs still locked. We 
were then allowed to dismount. Our coach was backed 
down for fifty yards or so. Small heaps of stones were 
piled opposite the hubs of the stationary coach. Our 
driver whipped his horses to a gallop, ran his near-wheels 
over these stones so that their hubs were raised above 
those of the near-wheels of the other coacli, and success- 
fully made the dare-devil passage, in which he had not 
more than a couple of inches' margin to save him from 
precipitation into eternity. I hardly knew which to" 
admire most — the ingenuity which thus made good in 
altitude what it lacked in latitude, or the phlegm with 



244 '^^^ Land of Contrasts 

which the occupants of the other coach retamed their 
seats throughout the entire episode. 

The Englishman arriving in Boston, say in the middle 
of the lovely autumnal weather of November, will be 
surprised to find a host of workmen in the Common 
and Public Garden busily engaged in laying- down 
miles of portable " plank paths " or '' board walks," ele- 
vated three or four inches above the level of the ground. 
A little later, when the snowy season has well set in, he 
will discover the usefulness of these apparently super- 
fluous planks ; and he will hardly be astonished to learn 
that the whole of the Northern States are covered in 
winter Avith a network of similar paths. These gang- 
ways are made in sections and numbered, so that when 
they are withdrawn from their summer seclusion they 
can be laid down with great precision and expedition. 
No statistician, so far as I know, has calculated the 
total length of the plank paths of an American winter; 
but I liave not tlie least doubt that they would reach 
from the earth to the moon, if not to one of the planets. 

The river and lake steamboats of the United 
States are on the average distinctly better than any I 
am acquainted with elsewhere. The much-vaunted 
splendours of such Scottish boats as the '' lona " and 
" Columba " sink into insignificance when compared 
with the wonderful vessels of the line plying from New 
York to Fall River. These steamers deserve the name 
of floating hotel or palace much more than even the 
finest ocean-liner, because to their sumptuous appoint- 
ments they add the fact that they are, except under 
very occasional circumstances, floating palaces and not 
reeling or tossing ones. The only hotel to which I can 



Baedekeriana 



245 



honestly compare the *' Campania " is the one at San 
Francisco in which I experienced my first earthquake. 
But even the veriest landsman of them all can enjoy the 
passage of Long Island Sound in one of these stately 
and stable vessels, whether sitting indoors listening to 
tlie excellent band in one of the spacious drawing- 
rooms in which there is absolutely no rude reminder of 
the sea, or on deck on a cool summer night watching 
the lights of New York gradually vanish in the black 
wake, or the moon riding triumphantly as queen of the 
heavenly host, and the innumerable twinkling beacons 
that safeguard our course. And when he retires to his 
cabin, pleasantly wearied by the glamour of the night 
and soothed by the supple stability of his floating home, 
he will find his bed and his bedroom twice as large as 
he enjoyed on the Atlantic, and may let the breeze 
enter, undeterred by fear of intruding wave or breach 
of regulation. If he takes a meal on board he will 
find the viands as well cooked and as dexterously 
served as in a fashionable restaurant on shore ; he may 
have, should he desire it, all the elbow-room of a sepa- 
rate table, and nothing will suggest to him the con- 
fined limits of the cook's galley or the rough-and-ready 
ways of marine cookery. 

Little inferior to the Fall River boats are those which 
ascend the Hudson from New York to Albany, one of 
the finest river voyages in the world ; and worthy to 
be compared with these are the Lake Superior steamers 
of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Among the special 
advantages of these last are the device by which meals 
are served in the fresh atmosphere of what is practically 
the upper deck, the excellent service of the neat lads 



246 The Land of Contrasts 

who officiate as waiters and are said to he often college 
students turning an honest summer penny, and the 
frequent presence in the hill of fare of the Coregonus 
clupeiformis^ or Lake Superior whitefish, one of the 
most toothsome morsels of the deep. Most of the other 
steamhoat lines hy which I travelled in the United 
States and Canada seemed to me as good as could he 
expected under the circumstances. There is, however, 
certainly room for improvement in some of the hoats 
which ply on the St. Lawrence, and the Alaska service 
will prohably grow steadily better with the growing rush 
of tourists. 

Another wonderful instance of British conservatism is 
the way in which we have stuck to the horrors of our 
own ferry-boat system long after America has shown us 
the way to cross a ferry comfortaljly. It is true that the 
American steam ferry-boats are not so graceful as ours, 
looking as they do like Noah's arks or floating houses, 
and being propelled by the grotesque daddy-long-leg- 
like arrangement of the walking-beam engine. They 
are, however, far more suitable for their purpose. The 
steamer as originally developed was, I take it, intended 
for long (or at any rate longish) voyages, and was built 
as far as possible on the lines of a sailing-vessel. The 
conservative John Bull never thought of modifying this 
shape, even when he adopted the steamboat for ferries 
such as that across the Mersey from Liverpool to Birk- 
enhead. He still retained the sea-going form, and pas- 
sengers had either to remain on a lofty deck, exposed to 
the full fury of tlie elements, or dive down into the 
stuffy depths of an unattractive cabin. As soon, how- 
ever, as Brother Jonathan's keen brain had to concern 



Baedekeriana 247 



itself with tlie problem, he saw the topsy-turvyness of 
this arrangement. Hence in his ferry-boats there are 
no " midergronnd " cabins, no exasperating flights of 
steps. We enter the ferry-house and wait comfortably 
under shelter till the boat approaches its " slip," which 
it does end on. The disembarking passengers depart by 
one passage, and as soon as they have all left the boat 
we enter by another. A roadway and two side-walks 
correspond to these divisions on the boat, which we enter 
on the level we are to retain for the passage. In the 
middle is the gangway for vehicles, to the right and left 
are the cabins for " ladies " and " gentlemen," each run- 
ning almost the whole length of the boat. There is a 
small piece of open deck at each end, and those who 
wish may ascend to an upper deck. These long-drawn- 
out cabins are simply but suitably furnished with seats 
like those in a tramway-car or American railway-carriage. 
The boat retraces its course without turning round, as it 
is a '' double-ender." On reaching the other side of the 
river we simply walk out of the boat as we should out 
of a house on the street-level. The tidal difficulty is 
met by making the landing-stage a floating one, and of 
such length that the angle it forms with terra firma is 
never inconvenient. 

A Swiss friend of mine, whose ocean steamer landed 
him on the New Jersey shore of the North River, 
actually entered the cabin of the ferry-boat under the 
impression that it was a waiting-room on shore. The 
boat slipped away so quietly that he did not discover his 
mistake until he had reached the New York side of the 
river ; and then there was no more astonished man on 
the whole continent! 



248 The Land of Contrasts 

The transition from travelhng facihties to the tele- 
graphic and postal services is natural. The telegraphs 
of the United States are not in the hands of the gov- 
ernment, but are controlled by private companies, of 
which the Western Union, with its headquarters in New 
York, is facile princeps. This company possesses the 
largest telegraph system in the world, having 21,000 
offices and 750,000 miles of wire. It also leases or uses 
seven Atlantic cables. In this, however, as in many 
other cases, size does not necessarily connote quality. 
]My experiences fnai/ (like the weather) have been excep- 
tional, and the attempt to judge of tliis Hercules by the 
foot I saw may be wide of tlie mark ; Imt here are 
three instances which are at any rate suspicious : 

I was living at Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia, 
and left one day about 2 P.M. for the city, intending to 
return for dinner. On the way, however, I made up my 
mind to dine in town and go to the theatre, and imme- 
diately on my arrival at Broad-street station (about 
2.15 P.M.) telegraphed back to this effect. When I 
reached the house again near midnight, I found the 
messenger with my telegram ringing the bell ! Again, 
a friend of mine in Philadelphia sent a telegram to me 
one afternoon about a meeting in the evening ; it reached 
me in Germantown, at a distance of about five miles, at 
8 o'clock the following morning. Again, I left Salis- 
bury (N.C.) one morning about 9 A.M. for Asheville, 
having previously telegraphed to the baggage-master at 
the latter place about a trunk of mine in his care. My 
train reached Asheville about 5 or 6 P.M. I went to the 
baggage-master, but found he had not received my wire. 
While I was talking to him, one of the train-men entered 



Baedekeriana 249 



and handed it to him. It had^ apparently^ been sent by 
hand on the train by ivhich I had travelled ! This tele- 
graphic giant may, of course, have accidentally and 
exceptionally put his wrong foot foremost on those occa- 
sions ; but such are the facts. 

The postal service also struck me as on the whole less 
prompt and accurate than that of Great Britain. The 
comparative infrequenc}^ of fully equipped post-offices is 
certainly an inconvenience. There are letter-boxes 
enough, and the commonest stamps may be procured in 
every drug-store (and of these there is no lack !) or even 
from the postmen ; but to have a parcel weighed, to 
register a letter, to procure a money-order, or sometimes 
even to buy a foreign stamp or post-card, the New 
Yorker or Philadelphian has to go a distance which a 
Londoner or GlasgOAvegian would think distinctly 
excessive. It appears from an official table prepared in 
1898 that about half the population of the United States 
live outside the free delivery service, and have to call at 
the post-office for their letters. On the other hand, the 
arrangements at the chief post-offices are very complete, 
and the subdivisions are numerous enough to prevent 
the tedious delays of the offices on the continent of 
Europe. The registration fee (eight cents) is double 
that of England. The convenient "special delivery 
stamp " (ten cents) entitles a letter to immediate deliv- 
ery by special messenger. The tendency for the estab- 
lishment of slight divergency in language between Eng- 
land and America is seen in the terms of the post-office 
as in those of the railway. A letter is " mailed," not 
" posted ; " the " postman " gives way to the " letter- 
carrier ; " a "post-card" is expanded into a "postal- 



250 The Land of Contrasts 

card." The stranger on arrival at New York will 
be amused to see the confiding way in which news- 
paper or hook packets, too large for the orifice, are 
placed on the top of the street letter-boxes (affixed to 
lamp-posts), and will doubtless be led to speculate on 
the different ways and instincts of the street Arabs of 
England and America. A second reflection will suggest 
to him the superior stability of the New York climate. 
On what day in England could we leave a postal packet of 
printed matter in the open air with any certainty that it 
would not be reduced to pulp in half an hour by a deluge 
of rain ? 

No remarks on the possible inferiority of the Amer- 
ican telegraph and postal systems would be fair if unac- 
companied by a tribute to the wonderful develo[)ment of 
the use of the telephone. New York has (or had very 
recently) more than twice as many subscribers to the 
telephonic exchanges as London, and some American 
towns possess one telephone for every twenty inhabitants, 
while the ratio in the British metropolis is 1 : 3,000. In 
1891 the United States contained 240,000 miles of tele- 
phone wires, used by over 200,000 regular subscribers. 
In 1895 the United Kingdom had about 100,000 miles of 
wire. The Metropolitan telephone in New York alone 
has 30,000 miles of subterranean wire and about 9,000 
stations. The great switch-board at its headquarters is 
250 feet long, and accommodates the lines of 6,000 sub- 
scribers. Some subscribers call for connection over a 
hundred times a day, and about one hundred and fifty 
girls are required to answer the calls. 

The generalisations made in travellers' books about 
the hotels of America seem to me as fallacious as 



Baedekeriana 251 



most of the generalisations about this chameleon among 
nations. Some of the American hotels I stayed at were 
about the best of their kind in the world, others about 
the worst, others again about half-way between these 
extremes. On the whole, I liked the so-called " Amer- 
ican system " of an inclusive price by the day, covering 
everything except such purely voluntary extras as wine ; 
and it seems to me that an ideal hotel on this system 
would leave very little to wish for. The large American 
way of looking at things makes a man prefer to give 
twenty shillings per day for all he needs and consumes 
rather than be botliered with a bill for sixteen to seven- 
teen shillings, including such items (not disdained even 
by the swellest European hotels) as one penny for sta- 
tionery or a shilling for lights. The weak points of the 
system as at present carried on are its needless expense 
owing to the wasteful profusion of the management, the 
tendency to have cast-iron rules for the hours within 
which a guest is permitted to be hungry, the refusal to 
make any allowance for absence from meals, and the 
general preference for quantity over quality. It is also 
a pity that baths are looked upon as a luxury of the rich 
and figure as an expensive extra; it is seldom that a 
hotel bath can be obtained for less than two shillings. 
There would seem, however, to be no reason why the 
continental table d'hote system should not be combined 
with the American plan. The bills of fare at present 
offered by large American hotels, with lists of fifty to 
one hundred different dishes to choose from, are simply 
silly, and mark, as compared with the table d'hote of, 
say, a good Parisian hotel, a barbaric failure to under- 
stand the kind of meal a lady or gentleman should want. 



252 The Land of Contrasts 

To prepare five times the quantity that will be called for 
or consumed is to confess a lack of all artistic perception 
of the relations of means and end. The man who floats 
over a list of fifty possible dishes is not at all the kind 
of customer who deserves encouragement. The service 
would also be improved if the waiters had not to carry 
in their heads the heterogeneous orders of six or eight 
people, each selecting a dozen different meats, vegetables, 
and condiments. The European or a la carte system is 
becoming more and more common in the larger cities, 
and many houses offer their patrons a choice of the two 
plans ; but the fixed-price system is almost universal in 
the smaller towns and country districts. In houses on 
the American system the price generally varies accord- 
ing to tlie style of room selected ; but most of the in- 
convenience of a bedchamber near the top of the house 
is obviated by the universal service of easy-running 
'^ elevators " or lifts. (By the Avay, the persistent man- 
ner in which the elevators are used on all occasions is 
often amusing. An American lady who has some twenty 
shallow steps to descend to the ground floor will rather 
Avait patiently five minutes for the elevator than walk 
downstairs.) 

Many of the large American hotels have defects sim- 
ilar to those Avith which Ave are familiar in their Euro- 
pean prototypes. They liave the same, if not an exag- 
gerated, gorgeousness of bad taste, the same plethora of 
ostentatious " luxuries " that add notliing to tlie real 
comfort of the man of refinement, the same pier glasses 
in heavy gilt frames, tlie same marble consoles, the 
same heaA^y hangings and absurdly soft carpets. On 
the other liand, tliey are apt to lack some of tlie unob- 



Baedekeriana 253 



trusive decencies of life, which so often mark the 
distinction between the modest home of a private 
gentleman and the palace of the travelling public. In- 
deed, it might truthfully be said that, 07i the wliole^ the 
passion for show is more rampant among American 
hotel-keepers than elsewhere. They are apt to be more 
anxious to have all the latest " improvements " and 
inventions than to ensure the smooth and easy running 
of what they already have. You will find a huge '' tel- 
eseme " or indicator in your bedroom, on the rim of 
which are inscribed about one hundred different objects 
that a traveller may conceivably be supposed to want ; 
but you may set the pointer in vain for your modest 
lemonade or wait half an hour before the waiter answers 
his complicated electric call. The service is sometimes 
very poor, even in the most pretentious establishments. 
On the other hand, I never saw better service in my 
life than that of the neat and refined white-clad maid- 
ens in the summer hotels of the White Mountains, 
Avho would take the orders of half-a-dozen persons for 
half a dozen different dishes each, and execute them with- 
out a mistake. It is said that many of these waitresses 
are college-girls or even school-mistresses, and certainly 
their ladylike appearance and demeanour and the intel- 
ligent look behind their not infrequent spectacles 
would support the assertion. It gave one a positive 
thrill to see the margin of one's soup-plate embraced by 
a delicate little pink-and-white thumb that miglit have 
belonged to Hebe herself, instead of the rawly red or 
clumsily gloved intruder that we are all too familiar 
with. The waiting of the coloured gentleman is also 
pleasant in its Avay to all who do not demand the epis- 



254 



The Land of Contrasts 



copal bearing of the best Enghsh butler. The smiling 
darkey takes a personal interest in your comfort, may 
possibly enquire Avhether you have dined to your liking, 
is indefatigable in ministering to your wants, slides and 
shuffles around with a never-failing bonhomie^ does every- 
thing with a characteristic flourish, and in his neat 
little white jacket often presents a most refreshing 
cleanliness of aspect as compared with tlie greasy sec- 
ond-hand dress coats of the p]uropean waiter. 

As a matter of fact, so much latitude is usually 
allowed for each meal (breakfast from 8 to 11, dinner 
from 12 to 3, and so on) that it is seldom really diffi- 
cult to get something to eat at an American hotel when 
one is hungry. At some hotels, however, the rules are 
very strict, and nothing is served out of meal hours. 
At Newport I came in one Sunday evening al)out 8 
o'clock, and found that supper was over. The manager 
actually allowed me to leave his hotel at once (which 
I did) rather than give me anything to eat. The case 
is still more absurd when one arrives by train, having 
had no cliance of a square meal all day, and is coolly 
expected to go to bed hungry ! The genuine democrat, 
however, may take what comfort he can from the 
thought that tliis state of affairs is due to the independ- 
ence of the American servants, who have their regular 
liours and refuse to work beyond tliem. 

The lack of smoking-rooms is a distinct weak point 
in American hotels. One may smoke in the large pub- 
lic office, often crowded with loungers not resident in 
the hotel, or may retire with his cigar to the bar-room ; 
but there is no pleasant little snuggery provided witli 
arm-chairs and smokers' tables, where friends may sit 



Baedekeriana 255 



in pleasant, nicotine-wreathed chat, ringing, when they 
want it, for a whiskey-and-soda or a cup of coffee. 

American hotels, even when otherwise good, are apt 
to be noisier than European ones. The servants have 
little idea of silence over their work, and the early morn- 
ing chambermaids crow to one another in a way that is 
very destructive of one's matutinal slumbers. Then 
somebody or otlier seems to crave ice-water at every 
hour of the day or night, and the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle 
of the ice-pitcher in the corridors becomes positively 
nauseous when one Avants to go to sleep. The innumer- 
able electric bells, always more or less on the go, are 
another auditory nuisance. 

While we are on the question of defects in American 
liotels, it sliould be noticed that the comfortable little 
second-class inns of Great Britain are practically 
unknown in the United States. The second-class inns 
there are run on the same lines as the best ones ; but in 
an inferior manner at every point. The food is usually 
as abundant, but it is of poorer quality and worse cooked ; 
the beds are good enough, but not so clean ; the table 
linen is soiled ; the sugar bowls are left exposed to the 
flies from week-end to week-end ; the service is poor and 
apt to l)e forward ; and (last, but not least) the man- 
ners of the other guests are apt to include a most super- 
fluous proportion of tobacco-chewing, expectorating, an 
open and unashamed use of the toothpick, and other 
little amenities that probably inflict more torture on 
those Avho are not used to them than would decorous 
breaches of the Decalogue. 

In criticising American hotels, it must not be forgot- 
ten that the rapid process of change that is so cliarac- 



256 The Land of Contrasts 

teristic of America operates in this sphere with especial 
force. This is at work a distinct tendency to substitute 
the subdued for the gaudy, the refined for the meretri- 
cious, the quiet for the loud ; and even now the cultured 
American who knows his monde may spend a great part 
of his time in hotels without conspicuously lowering the 
tone of his environment. 

The prevalent idea that the American hotel clerk is 
a mannerless despot is, me judice, rather too severe. 
He is certainly apt to be rather curt in his replies and 
ungenial in his manner ; but this is not to be Avondered 
at when one reflects under what a fire of questions he 
stands all day long and from week to week ; and, besides, 
he does generally give the information that is wanted. 
That he should wear diamond studs and dress gor- 
geously is not unnatural when one considers the social 
stratum from which he is drawn. Do not our very cooks 
the same as far as they can? That he should somewhat 
magnify the importance of his office is likewise explica- 
ble ; and, after all, how many human beings have greater 
power over the actual personal comforts of the fraction 
of the world they come into contact with? I can, 
however, truthfully boast that I met hotel clerks who, in 
moments of relief from pressure, treated me almost as 
an equal, and one or two wlio seemed actually disposed 
to look on me as a friend. I certainly never encoun- 
tered any actual rudeness from the American hotel clerk 
such as I have experienced from the pert young ladies 
who sometimes fill his place in England ; and in the less 
frequented resorts he sometimes took a good deal of trou- 
ble to put the stranger in the way to do his business 
speedily and comf()i'tal)ly. His omniscience is great, but 



Baedekeriana 257 



not so phenomenal as I expected ; I posed him more than 
once with questions about his abode which, it seemed to 
me, every intelligent citizen should have been able to 
answer easily. In his most characteristic development 
the American hotel clerk is an urbane living encyclo- 
pedia, as passionless as the gods, as unbiassed as the 
multiplication table, and as tireless as a Corliss engine. 
Traveller's tales as to the system of " tipping '' in 
American hotels differ widely. The truth is probably as 
far from the indignant Briton's assertion, based proba- 
bly upon one flagrant instance in New York, that " it is 
ten times worse than in England and tantamount to rol> 
bery with violence," as from the patriotic American's 
assurance that " The thing, sir, is absolutely unknown in 
our free and enlightened country ; no American citizen 
would demean himself to accept a gratuity." To judge 
from my own experience, I should say that the practice 
was quite as common in such cities as Boston, New 
York, and Philadelphia as in Europe, and more onerous 
because the amounts expected are larger. A dollar goes 
no farther than a shilling. Moreover, the gratuity is 
usually given in the form of " refreshers " from day to day, 
so that the vengeance of the disappointed is less easily 
evaded. Miss Bates, a very friendly writer on America, 
reports various unpleasantnesses that she received from 
untipped waiters, and tells of an American who found 
that his gratuities for two months at a Long Branch 
hotel (for three persons and their horses) amounted to 
X40. In certain other walks of life the hal)it of tipping 
is carried to more extremes in New York than in any 
European city I know of. Thus the charge for a shave 
(already sufficiently higli) is 7i(7., but the operator 



258 The Land of Contrasts 

expects 2^d. more for himself. One barber with whom 
I talked on the subject openly avowed that he considered 
himself wronged if he did not get his fee, and recounted 
the various devices he and his fellows practised to 
extract gratuities from the unwilling. As one goes 
West or South the S3^stem of tipping seems to fall more 
and more into abeyance, though it will always be found 
a useful smoother of the way. In California, so far as 
I could judge, it was almost entirely unknown, and the 
Calif ornian hotels are among the best in the Union. 

Among the lessons which English and other European 
hotels might learn from American hotels may be named 
the following : 

1. The combination of the present a la carte system 
with the inclusive or American system, by which those 
who don't want the trouble of ordering their repasts may 
be sure of finding meals, with a reasonable latitude of 
choice in time and fare, ready wdien desired. It is a 
sensible comfort to know beforehand exactly, or almost 
exactly, what one's hotel expenses will amount to. 

2. The abolition of the charge for attendance. 

3. A greater variety of dishes than is usually offered 
in any except our very largest hotels. This is especially 
to be desired at breakfast. Without going to the Amer- 
ican extreme of fifty or a hundred dishes to choose from, 
some intermediate point short of the Scylla of sole and 
the Charybdis of ham and eggs might surely be found. 
Tliere is probably more pig-headed conservatism than 
justified fear of expense in the reluctance to follow 
this most excellent "American lead." The British 
tourist in the United States takes so kindly to the pre- 
liminary fruit and cereal dishes of America that he 



Baedekeriana 259 



would probably show no objection to them on his native 
heath. 

4. An extension of the system of ringing once for the 
boots, twice for the chambermaid, and so on. The 
ordinary American table of calls goes up to nine. 

5. The provision of writing materials free for the 
guests of the hotels. The charge for stationery is one 
of the pettiest and most exasperating cheese-parings of 
tlie English Boniface's system of account-keeping. If, 
however, he imitates the liberality of his American 
brother, it is to be hoped that he will "go him one 
better " in the matter of blotting-paper. Nothing in the 
youthful country across the seas has a more venerable 
appearance than the stiips of blotting-paper supplied in 
the writing-rooms of its hotels. 

Nothing in its way could be more inviting or seem 
more appropriate than the cool and airy architecture 
of the summer hotels in such districts as the Wliite 
Mountains, with their wide and shady verandas, their 
overhanging eaves, their balconies, their spacious corri- 
dors and vestibules, their simple yet tasteful wood- 
panelling, their creepers outside and tlieir growing 
plants within. Mr. Howells has somewhere reversed 
the threadbare comparison of an Atlantic liner to a 
floating hotel, by likening a hostelry of this kind to a 
saloon steamer; and indeed the comparison is an apt 
one, so light and buoyant does the construction seem, 
with its gailjr painted wooden sides, its glass-covered 
veranda decks, and its streaming flags. Perhaps the 
nearest analogue that we have to the life of an Am- 
erican summer hotel is seen in our large hydropathic 
establishments, such as those at Peebles or Crieff, wdiere 



26o The Land of Contrasts 

the therapeutic appliances play but a subdued ol)bligato 
to the daily round of amusements. The same spirit of 
camaraderie generally rules at l)oth ; both have the same 
regular meal-hours, at which almost as little drinking is 
seen at the one as the other ; both have their evening 
entertainments got up (^gotten up, our American cousins 
say, with a delightfully old fashioned flavour) by the 
enterprise of the most active guests. The hydropathists 
have to go to bed a little sooner, and must walk to the 
neighbouring village if they ^vish a Ijar-room ; but on the 
whole their scheme of life is much the same. Whether 
it is due to the American temperament or the American 
weather, the palm for brightness, vivacity, variety, and 
picturesqueness must be adjudged to the hotel. For 
those who are young enough to "stand the racket," no 
form of social gaiety can be found more amusing than 
a short sojourn at a popular summer hotel among the 
mountains or by the sea, with its constant round of 
drives, rides, tennis and golf matches, picnics, "ger- 
mans," bathing, boating, and loafing, all permeated by 
flirtation of the most audacious and innocent description. 
The focus of the whole carnival is found in the " piazza " 
or veranda, and no prettier sight in its way can be imag- 
ined than the groups and rows of "rockers " and wicker 
chairs, each occupied by a lithe young girl in a summer 
frock, or her athletic admirer in his tennis flannels. 

The enormous extent of the summer exodus to the 
mountains and the seas in America is overwhelming ; 
and a population of sixty-five millions does not seem a 
bit too much to account for it. I used to think that 
about all the Americans who could afford to travel came 
to Europe. But the iVmerican tourists in Europe are, 



Baedekeriana 261 



after all, but a drop in the bucket compared with the 
oceans of sunnner and winter visitors to the Adiron- 
dacks and Florida, Manitoba Springs and the coast of 
Maine, the Catskills and Long Brancn, Newport and 
Lenox, Bar Harbor and California, White Sulphur 
Springs and the Minnesota Lakes, Saratoga and Richfield, 
The Thousand Isles and Martha's Vineyard, Niagara 
and Trenton Falls, Old Point Comfort and Asheville, 
the Yellowstone and the Yosemite, Alaska and the Hot 
Springs of Arkansas. And everywhere that the season's 
visitor is expected he will find hotels awaiting him that 
range all the way from reasonable comfort to outrageous 
magnificence ; while a simpler taste will find a plain 
boarding-house by almost every mountain pool or practi- 
cable beach in the whole wide expanse of the United 
States. The Briton may not have yet abdicated his 
post as the champion traveller or explorer of unknown 
lands, but the American is certainly the most restless 
mover from one resort of civilisation to another. 

Perhaps the most beautiful hotel in the world is the 
Ponce de Leon at St. Augustine, Florida, named after 
the Spanish voyager who discovered the flowery ^ State 
in 1512, and explored its streams on his romantic search 
for the fountain of eternal youth. And when I say 
beautiful I use the word in no auctioneering sense of 
mere size, and height, and evidence of expenditure, but 
as meaning a truly artistic creation, fine in itself and 
appropriate to its environment. The hotel is built of 
"coquina," or shell concrete, in a Spanish renaissance 

1 This epithet must not confirm the usual erroneous belief that Florida means 
" the flowery State." It is so called because discovered on Easter Day (Spanish 
Pascua Florida) . 



262 The Land of Contrasts 

style with Moorish features, which harmonises admirably 
with the sunny sky of Florida and the historic associa- 
tions of St. Augustine. Its colour scheme, with the 
creamy white of the concrete, the overhanging roofs of 
red tile, and the brick and terra-cotta details, is very 
effective, and contrasts well with the deep-blue overhead 
and the luxuriant verdancy of the orange-trees, magno- 
lias, palmettos, oleanders, bananas, and date-palms that 
surround it. The building encloses a large open court, 
and is lined by columned verandas, while the minaret- 
like towers dominate the expanse of dark-red roof. The 
interior is richly adorned with wall and ceiling paintings 
of historical or allegorical import, skilfully avoiding 
crudity or garishness ; and the marble and oak decora- 
tions of the four-galleried rotunda are worthy of the 
rest of the structure. The general effect is one of 
luxurious and artistic ease, with suggestions of an 
Oriental dolce far niente in excellent keeping with the 
idea of the winter idler's home. The Ponce de Leon 
and the adjoining and more or less similar structures of 
the Alcazar, the Cordova, and the Villa Zorayda form 
indeed an architectural group which, taken along with 
the semi-tropical vegetation and atmosphere, alone repays 
a long journey to see. But let the strictly economical 
traveller take up his quarters in one of the more modest 
hostelries of the little town, unless he is willing to pay 
dearly (and yet not perhaps too dearly) for the privilege 
of living in the most artistic hotel in the world. 

It is a long cry from Florida to California, where 
stands another hotel which suggests mention for its 
almost unique perfections. The little town of Monterey, 
with its balmy air, its beautiful sandy beach, its adobe 



Baedekeriaiia 263 



buildings, and its charming surroundings, is, like St. 
Augustine, full of interesting Spanish associations, 
dating hack to 1602. The Hotel del Monte, or " Hotel 
of the Forest," one of the most comfortable, best-kept, 
and moderate-priced hotels of America, lies amid blue- 
grass lawns and exquisite grounds, in some ways recalling 
the parks of England's gentry, though including among 
its noble trees such un-English specimens as the sprawl- 
ing and moss-draped live-oaks and the curious Monterey 
pines and cypresses. Its gardens offer a continual 
feast of colour, with their solid acres of roses, violets, 
calla lilies, heliotrope, narcissus, tulips, and crocuses ; 
and one part of them, known as " Arizona," contains a 
wonderful collection of cacti. The hotel itself has no 
pretension to rival the Ponce de Leon in its architecture 
or appointments, and is, I ,,think, built of wood. It is, 
however, very large, encloses a spacious garden-court, 
and makes a pleasant enough impression, with its turrets, 
balconies, and verandas, its many sharp gables, dormers, 
and window-hoods. The economy of the interior re- 
minded me more strongly of the amenities and decencies 
of the house of a refined, well-to-do, and yet not extrava- 
gantly wealthy family than of the usual hotel atmos- 
phere. There w^ere none of the blue satin hangings, 
ormolu vases, and other entirely superfluous luxuries for 
which we have to pay in tlie bills of certain hotels at 
Paris and elsewhere ; but on the other hand nothing 
was lacking that a fastidious but reasonable taste could 
demand. The rooms and corridors are spacious and airy ; 
everything was as clean and fresh as white paint and 
floor polish could make them ; the beds were comfortable 
and fragrant ; the linen was spotless ; there was lots of 



264 The Land of Contrasts 

" hanging room ; " each pair of hedrooms shared a hath- 
room ; the cuisiyie was good and sufficiently varied ; the 
waiter were attentive ; flowei*s were ahundant without 
and within. The price of all this real luxury was |3 to 
$3.50 (12s. to 14s.) a day. Possibly the absolute perfec- 
tion of the bright and soft Californian spring when I 
visited Monterey, and the exquisite beauty of its environ- 
ment, may have lulled my critical faculties into a state of 
unusual somnolence ; but when I quitted the Del Monte 
Hotel I felt that I was leaving one of the most charming 
homes I had ever had the good fortune to live in. 

The only hotel that to my mind contests with the 
Del Monte the position of the best hotel in the North 
American continent is the Canadian Pacific Hotel at 
Banff, in the National Rocky Mountains Park of Canada. 
Here also magnificent scenery, splendid Aveather, and 
moderate charges combined to bias my judgment; but 
the residuum, after all due allowance made for these fac- 
tors, still, after five years, assures me of most unusual 
excellence. Two things in particular I remember in 
connection with this hotel. The one is the almost abso- 
lute perfection of the waiting, carried on by gentlemanly 
youths of about eighteen or twenty, who must, I think, 
have formed the corps cC elite of the thousands of waiters 
in the service of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The 
marvellous speed and dexterity with Avhich they minis- 
tered to my wants, the absolutely neat and even dainty 
manner in which everything was done by them, and 
their modest readiness to make suggestions and help 
one's choice (always to the point!) make one of the 
pleasantest pictures of hotel life lurking in my memory. 
The other dominant recollection of the Banff Hotel 



Baedekeriana 26c;: 



is the wonderfully beautiful view from the summer- 
house at its northeast corner. Just below the bold 
bluff on which this hotel stands the piercingly blue Bow 
River throws itself down in a string of foaming white 
cataracts to mate with the amber and rapid-rushing 
Spray. The level valley through which the united and 
now placid stream flows is carpeted with the vivid-red 
painter's brush, white and yellow marguerites, asters, 
tireweed, golden-rod, and blue-bells ; to the left rise the 
perpendicular cliffs of Tunnel Mountain, while to the 
right Mt. Kundle lifts its weirdly sloping, snow-flecked 
peaks into the azure. 

In the dense green woods of the Adirondacks, five 
miles from the nearest high road on the one side and on 
the other lapped by an ocean of virgin forest which to 
the novice seems almost as pathless as the realms of 
Neptune, stands the Adirondack Lodge, probably one 
of the most quaint, picturesque little hotels in the world. 
It is tastefully built in the style of a rustic log-hut, its 
timber being merely rough-hewn by the axe and not 
reduced to monotonous symmetry by the saw-mill. It 
is roofed with bark, and its wide-eaved verandas are 
borne by tree-trunks with the bark still on. The same 
idea is carried out in the internal equipment, and the 
bark is left intact on much of the furniture. The wood 
retains its natural colours, and there are no carpets or 
paint. This charming little hotel is due to the taste or 
whim of a New York electrical engineer (the inven- 
tor, I believe, of the well-known "ticker"), who acts the 
landlord in such a way as to make the sixty or seventy 
inmates feel like the guests of a private host. The clerk 
is a medical student, the very bell-boy ("Eddy") a 



266 The Land of Contrasts 

candidate for Harvard, and both mix on equal terms 
with the genial circle that collects round the bonfire 
lighted in front of the house every summer's evening. 
As one lazily lay there, watching the wavering play 
of the ruddy blaze on the dark-green pines, listening 
to the educated chatter of the boy who cleaned the 
boots, realising that a deer, a bear, or perchance even a 
catamount might possibly be lurking in the dark woods 
around, and knowing that all the material comforts 
of civilised life awaited one inside the house, one felt 
very keenly the genuine Americanism of this Arcadia, 
and thought how hard it Avould be to reproduce the effect 
even in the imagination of the European. 

It was in this same Adirondack Wilderness that I 
stayed in the only hotel that, so far as I know, caught 
on to the fact that I was a " chiel amang them takin' 
notes " for a guidebook. With true American enter- 
prise I was informed, when I called for my bill, that 
that was all right ; and I still recall Avith amusement 
the incredulous and obstinate resistance of the clerk to 
my insistence on paying my way. I hope that the gen- 
ial proprietors do not attribute the asterisk that I gave 
the hotel to their well-meant efforts to give me quid pro 
quoy but credit me Avith a totally unbiassed admiration for 
their good management and comfortable quarters. 

Mention has already been made (p. 30) of a hotel at a 
frequented Avatering-place, at which the loAvest purchas- 
able quantity of sleep cost one pound sterling. It is, 
perhaps, superfluous to say that the rest procured at this 
cost Avas certainly not four or five times better than that 
easily procurable for four or five shillings ; and that the 
luxury of this hotel appealed, not in its taste perhaps, but 



Baedekerlana 267 



certainly in its effect, to the shoddy rather than to the 
refined demands of the traveller. Shenstone certainly 
never associated the ease of his inn with any such hyper- 
bolical sumptuousness as this ; and it probably could 
not arise in any community that did not include a large 
class of individuals with literally more money than 
they knew what to do with, and desirous of any means 
of indicating their powers of expenditure. It has been 
said of another hotel at Bar Harbor that " Anyone can 
stay there who is worth two millions of dollars, or can 
produce a certificate from the Recorder of New York 
that he is a direct descendant of Hendrik Hudson or 
Diedrich Knickerbocker." 

Many other American hotels suggest themselves to me 
as sufficiently individual in cliaracter to discriminate 
them from the ruck. Such are the Hygieia at (31d Point 
Comfort, with its Southern guests in summer and its 
Northern guests in winter; looking out from its carefully 
enclosed and glazed piazzas over the waste of Hampton 
Roads, wliere the " Merrimac " wrought devastation to tlie 
vessels of the Union until itself vanquished by the turret- 
ship " Monitor ; " the enormous caravansaries of Saratoga, 
one of which alone accommodates two thousand visitors, 
or the population of a small town, while the three larg- 
est have together room for five thousand people ; the 
liotel at the White Sulphur Springs of Virginia, for 
nearly a century the typical resort of the wealth and 
aristocracy of tlie South, and still furnishing the eligible 
stranger with a most attractive picture of Southern 
beauty, grace, warm-heartedness, and manners ; the 
Stockbridge Inn in the Berkshire Hills, long a striking 
exception to the statement tliat no country inns of tlie 



268 The Land of Contrasts 

best English type can he found in the United States, but 
unfortunately burned down a year or two ago ; the 
Catskill Mountain House, situated on an escarpment 
rising so abruptly from the plain of the Hudson that 
the view from it has almost the same effect as if we were 
leaning out of the car of a balloon or over the battle- 
ments of a castle two thousand feet high ; the colossal 
Auditorium of Chicago, with its banquet hall and kitchen 
on the tenth floor ; and the Palace Hotel of San Fran- 
cisco, with its twelve hundred beds and its covered and 
resonant central court. Enough has, however, been said 
to sliow that all American hotels are not the immense 
and featureless barracks that many Europeans believe, 
but that they also run through a full gamut of variety 
and character. 

The restaurant is by no means such an institution in 
the United States as in the continental part of Europe ; 
in this matter the American habit is more on all fours 
with English usage. The cafe of Europe is, perhaps, 
best represented by the piazza. Of course there are 
numerous restaurants in all the la^-ger cities ; but else- 
where the traveller will do well to stick to the meals 
at his hotel. The best restaurants are often in the hands 
of Germans, Italians, or Frenchmen. This is conspicu- 
ously so at New York. Delmonico's has a worldwide 
reputation, and is undoubtedly a good restaurant ; but 
it may well be questioned whether the New York esti- 
mate of its merits is not somewhat excessive. If price 
be the criterion, it has certainly few superiors. The a 
la carte restaurants are, indeed, all apt to be expensive 
ioY the single traveller, who will find that he can easily 
spend eight to twelve shillings on a l)y no means sump- 



Baedekeriana 269 



tuoiis meal. The French system of supplying one portion 
for two persons or two portions for three is, however, in 
vogue, and this diminishes the cost materially. The table 
d'hdte restaurants, on the other hand, often give excellent 
value for their charges. The Italians have especially 
devoted themselves to this form of the art, and in New 
York and Boston furnish one with a very fair dinner 
indeed, including a flask of drinkable Chianti, for four 
or five shillings. At some of the simple German restau- 
rants one gets excellent German fare and beer, but 
these are seldom available for ladies. The fair sex, 
liowever, takes care to be provided with more elegant 
establishments for its own use, to Avhich it sometimes 
admits its husbands and brothers. The sign of a large 
restaurant in New York reads : " Women's Cooperative 
Restaurant ; tables reserved for gentlemen," in which I 
knew not whether more to admire the uncompromising 
antithesis between the plain word " women " and the 
complimentary term " gentlemen " or the considerate- 
ness that supplies separate accommodation for the 
shrinking creatures denoted by the latter. Perhaps this 
is as good a place as any to note that it is usually as 
unwise to patronise a restaurant which professedly 
caters for " gents " as to buy one's leg-coverings of a 
tailor who knows them only as " pants." Probabl}^ the 
'' adult gents' bible-class," which Professor Freeman 
encountered, was equally unsatisfactory. 

Soup, poultry, game, and sweet dishes are generally 
as good as and often better than in English restauran.ts. 
Beef and mutton, on the other hand, are frequently 
inferior, though the American porterhouse and other 
steaks sometimes recall English glories that seem 



270 The Land of Contrasts 

largely to have vanished. The list of American fish 
is hy no means identical with that of Europe, and some 
of the varieties (such as salmon) seem scarcely as 
savoury. The stranger, however, will find some of his 
new fishy acquaintances decided acquisitions, and it 
takes no long time to acquire a very decided liking for 
the bass, the pompano, and the bluefish, while even the 
shad is discounted only by his innumerable bones. The 
praises of the American oyster should be sung by an 
abler and more poetic pen than mine ! He may not 
possess the full oceanic flavour (coppery, the Americans 
call it) of our best "natives," but lie is large, and juicy, 
and cool, and succulent, and fresh, and (above all) 
clieap and abundant. The variety of Avays in Avhich he 
is served is a striking index of the fertile ingenuity of 
the American mind ; and the man who knows the oyster 
only on the half-shell or en escalope is a mere culinary 
suckling compared with him who has been ])rought face 
to face with the bivalve in stews, plain roasts, fancy 
roasts, fries, broils, and fricassees, to say nothing of the 
form "pigs in blankets," or as parboiled in its own 
liquor, creamed, sauted, or pickled. 

Wine or beer is much less frequently drunk at meals 
than in Europe, though the amount of alcoholic liquor 
seen on the tables of a hotel would be a very misleading 
measure of the amount consumed. The men have a 
curious habit of flocking to the bar-room immediately 
after dinner to imbibe the stimulant that preference, or 
custom, or the fear of tlieir wives has deprived them of 
during the meal. Wine is generally poor and dear. 
The mixed drinks at the bar are fascinating and prol> 
ably very indigestible. Their names are not so bizarre 



■i 



Baeclekeriana 271 



as it is an article of the European's creed to believe. 
America possesses the largest brewery in the Avorld, that 
of Pabst at Milwaukee, producing more than a million 
of gallons a year ; and' there are also large breweries at 
St. Louis, Rochester, and many other places. The beer 
made resembles the German lager, and is often excellent. 
Its use is apparently spreading rapidly from the German 
Americans to Americans of other nationalities. The 
native wine of California is still fighting against the 
unfavourable reputation it acquired from the ignorance 
and impatience of its early manufacturers. The art of 
wine-growing, however, is now followed with more 
brains, more experience, and more capital, and the 
result is in many instances excellent. The vin ordinaire 
of California, largely made from the Zinfandel grape, 
has been described as a " peasant's wine," but when 
drunk on the spot compares fairly with the cheaper 
wines of Europe. Some of the finest brands of, Cali- 
fornian red wine (such as that known as Las Palmas), 
generally to be had from the producers only, are sound 
and well-flavoured wines, whicli will probably improve 
steadily. It is a thousand pities that the hotels and 
restaurants of the United States do not do more to push 
the sale of these native wines, which are at least better 
than most of the foreign wine sold in America at extrav- 
agant charges. It is also alleged that the Calif ornian 
and other American wines are often sold under French 
labels and at French prices, thus doing a double injus- 
tice to their native soil. Coffee or tea is always included 
in the price of an American meal, and these comforting 
beverages (particularly coffee) appear at luncheon and 
dinner in the huge cups tliat we associate with breakfast 



272 The Land of Contrasts 

exclusivelye Nor do they follow the meal, as with us, 
but accompany it. This practice, of course, does not 
hold in the really first-class hotels and restaurants. 

The real national beverage is, however, ice-water. Of 
this I have little more to say than to warn the Brit- 
ish visitor to suspend his judgment until he has been 
some time in the country. I certainly was not preju- 
diced in favour of this chilly draught when I started for 
the United States, but I soon came to find it natural and 
even necessary, and as much so from the dry hot air of 
the stove-heated room in winter as from the natural 
ambition of the mercury in summer. The habit so easily 
formed was as easily unlearned when I returned to civili- 
sation. On the Avhole, it may be philosophic to conclude 
that a universal habit in any country has some solid if 
cryptic reason for its existence, and to surmise that the 
drinking of ice-water is not so deadly in the States as it 
might be elsewhere. It certainly is universal enough. 
When you ring a bell or look at a waiter, ice-water is 
innnediately brought to you. Each meal is started with 
a full tumbler of that fluid, and the observant darke}^ 
rarely allows the tide to ebb until the meal is concluded. 
Ice-water is provided gratuitously and copiously on 
trains, in waiting-rooms, even sometimes in the public 
fountains. If, finally, I were asked to name the charac- 
teristic sound of the United States, Avhich would tell you 
of your whereabouts if transported to America in an in- 
stant of time, it would be the musical tinkle of the ice 
in the small white pitchers that the bell-boys in hotels 
seem perennially carrying along all tlie corridors, day 
and night, year in and year out. 



XIII 
The American Note 

THOSE who have done me the honour to read 
through the earlier pages of this volume will 
probal^ly find notliing in the present chapter 
that has not already been implied in them, if 
not expressed. Indeed, I should not consider these pages 
written to any purpose if they did not give some indi- 
cation of what I believe to be the dominant trend of 
American civilisation. A certain amount of condensed 
explication and recapitulation may not, however, be out 
of place. 

In spite of the heterogeneous elements of which 
American civilisation consists, and in spite of the ever- 
ready pitfalls of spurious generalisation, it seems to me 
that there is very distinctly an American note, different 
in pitch and tone from any note in the European con- 
cert. The scale to which it belongs is not, indeed, one 
out of all relation to that of the older hemisphere, in 
the way, for example, in which the laws governing Chi- 
nese music seem to stand apart from all relations to 
those on which the Sonata Appassionata is constructed. 
"The American," as Emerson said, "is only the con- 
tinuation of the English genius into new conditions, 
more or less propitious ; " and the American note, as I 
understand it, is, with allowance for modifications by 

273 



274 'Th^ Land of Contrasts 

other nationalities, after all merely the New World in- 
carnation of a British potentiality. 

To sum it up in one word is hardly practicable ; even 
a Carlylean epithet could scarcely focus the content of 
this idea. It includes a sense of illimitable expansion 
and possibilit}^ ; an almost childlike confidence in liuman 
ability and fearlessness of both the present and the 
future ; a wider realisation of human brotherhood than 
has yet existed ; a greater theoretical Avillingness to 
judge by the individual rather than by the class ; a 
breezy indifference to authority and a positive predilec- 
tion for innovation ; a marked alertness of mind and a 
manifold variety of interest ; above all, an inextinguish- 
able hopefulness and courage. It is easy to lay one's 
finger in America upon almost every one of the great 
defects of civilisation — even those defects which are 
specially characteristic of the civilisation of the Old 
World. The United States cannot claim to be exempt 
from manifestations of economic slavery, of grinding 
the faces of tlie poor, of exploitation of the weak, of 
unfair distribution of wealth, of unjust monopoly, of 
unequal laws, of industrial and commercial chicanery, 
of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public 
corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public 
spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobber}^, 
of class prejudice, of respect of persons, of a preference 
of the material over the spiritual. In a word, America 
has not attained, or nearly attained, perfection. But 
l)elow and behind and beyond all its Aveaknesses and 
evils, there is the grand fact of a noble national theory, 
founded on reason and conscience. Those may scoff 
Avho will at the idea of anything so intangible being 



The American Note 275 

allowed to count seriously in the estimation of a nation's 
or an individual's happiness hut the man of any imagi- 
nation can surely conceive the stimulus of the constantly 
ahiding sense of a fine national ideal. The vagaries of 
the Congress at Washington may sometimes cause a 
man more personal inconvenience than the doings of 
the Parlia,ment at Westminster, hut they cannot wound 
his self-respect or insult his reason in the same wa}^ as 
the idea of heing ruled hy a group of individuals avIio 
have merely taken the trouhle to he horn. The hauteur 
and insolence of those " ahove " us are always unpleas- 
ant, hut they are much easier to hear when we feel that 
they are entirely at variance with the theory of the 
society in which they appear, and are at worst merely 
sporadic manifestations. Even the tyranny of trusts is 
not to be compared to the tyranny of landlordism ; for 
the one is felt to he merely an unhappy and (it is 
hoped) temporary aberration of well-meant social 
machinery, while the other seems bred in the very bone 
of the national existence. It is the old story of freedom 
and hardship being preferable to chains and luxury. 
The material environment of the American may often 
be far less interesting and suggestive than that of the 
European, but his mind is freer, his mental attitude 
more elastic. Every American carries a marshal's baton 
in his knapsack in a way that has hardly ever been true 
in Europe. It may not assume a more tangible shape 
than a feeling of self-respect that has never been 
wounded by the thought of personal inferiority for 
merely conventional reasons ; but he must be a materi- 
alist indeed who undervalues this priceless possession. 
It is something for a country to have reached the stage 



276 The Land of Contrasts 

of passing "resolutions," even if their conversion into 
"• acts " lags a little ; it is bootless to sneer at a real 
" land of promise " because it is not at once and in every 
way a '' land of performance." 

There is something wonderfully rare and delicate in 
the finest blossoms of American civilisation — some- 
thing that can hardly be paralleled in Europe. The 
mind that has been brought up in an atmosphere theo- 
retically free from all false standards and conventional 
distinctions acquires a singularly unbiassed, detached, 
absolute, purely human way of viewing life. In Matthew 
Arnold's phrase, '' it sees life steadily and sees it whole." 
Just this attitude seems unattainable in England ; 
neither in my reading nor my personal experience have 
I encountered what I mean elsewhere than in America. 
We may feel ourselves, for example, the equal of a mar- 
quis, but does he ? And even if he does, do A, and B, 
and C ? No profoundness of belief in our own superi- 
ority or the superiority of a humble friend to the aristo- 
crat can make us ignore the circumambient feeling on the 
subject in the same way that the man brought up in the 
American vacuum does. 

The true-born American is absolutely incapable of 
comprehending the sense of difference between a lord 
and a plebeian that is forced on the most philosophical 
among ourselves by the mere pressure of tlie social 
atmosphere. It is for him a fourth dimension of space ; 
it may be talked about, but practically it has no exist- 
ence. It is entirely within the bounds of possibility for 
an American to attempt graciously to put royalty at its 
ease, and to try politely to make it forget its anomalous 
position. The British radical philosopher may attain 



The American Note 277 

the height of saying, '' With a great sum obtained I this 
' freedom ' ; " the American may honestly reply, " But I 
was free-born." 

It is necessary to take long views of American civili- 
sation ; not to fix our gaze upon small evils in the fore- 
ground, not to mistake an attack of moral measles for a 
scorbutic taint. It is quite conceivable that a philo- 
sophic observer of a century ago might almost have pre- 
dicted the moral and social course of events in the 
United States, if he had only been informed of the com- 
ing material conditions, such as the overwhelmingly 
rapid growth of the country in wealth and population, 
coupled with a democratic form of government. Even if 
assured that the ultimate state of the nation would be 
satisfactory, he would still have foreseen the difficulties 
hemming its progress toward the ideal : the inevitable 
delays, disappointments, and set-baclis ; the struggle be- 
tween the gross and the spiritual ; the troubles arising 
from the constant accession of new raw material before 
the old was welded into shape. There is nothing in the 
present evils of America to lead us to despair of the 
Republic, if only we let a legitimate imagination place us 
on a view-point sufficiently distant and sufficiently high 
to enable us to look backwards and forwards over long 
stretches of time, and lose the effect of small roughnesses 
in the foreground. Even M. de Tocqueville exagger- 
ated the evils existing when he wrote his famous work, 
and forecast catastrophes that have never arisen and 
seem daily less and less likely ever to arise. Let it be 
enough for the present that America has worked out " a 
rough average happiness for the million," that the great 
masses of the people liave attained a by no means des- 



278 The Land of Contrasts 

picable amount of independence and comfort. Those 
who are apt to think that the comfort of the crowd 
must mean the ennui of the cultured may safely be 
reminded of Obermann's saying, that no individual life 
can (or ought to) be happy passee au milieu des gen- 
erations qui souffrenf. This source of unhappiness, at 
any rate, is less potent in the United States than else- 
where. It is only natural that material prosperity should 
come more quickly than emancipation from ignorance, as 
Professor Norton has noted in a masterly, though perhaps 
characteristically pessimistic, article in the Forum for 
February, 1896. It may, too, be true, as the same writer 
remarks, that the connnon school system of America 
does little '^ to quicken the imagination, to refine and 
elevate the moral intelligence ; " and the remark is valu- 
able as a note of warning. But it may well be asked 
whether the American school system is in this respect 
unfavourably distinguished from that of any other 
country ; and it must not be forgotten that even instruc- 
tion in ordinary topics stimulates the soil for more 
valuable growths. The methods of the Salvation Army 
do not appeal to the dilettante ; but it is more than 
possible that the grandchildren of the man whose imagi- 
nation has been touched, if ever so slightly, by the crude 
appeal of trombones out of tune and the sight of poke- 
bonnets and backward-striding maidens, will be more 
intelligent and susceptible human beings than the grand- 
children of the chawbacon whose mental horizon has 
been bounded by the bottom of his pewter mug. 

Those who think for themselves will naturally make 
more mistakes than those who carefully follow the 
dictates of a competent authority; but there are other 



The American Note 279 

counterbalancing advantages which bring the enterpris- 
ing mistake-maker more speedily to the goal than his 
impeccable rival. The poet might almost have sung 
'' 'Tis better to have erred and learned than never to 
have erred at all." The intellectual monopoly of Eng- 
land is, perhaps, even more dangerous than the material. 
The monastic societies of Oxford and Cambridge are too 
apt to insist on certain /orwzs of knowledge, and to think 
that real wisdom is the prerogative of the few. And we 
undoubtedly owe many of the healthy breezes of rebel- 
lion and scepticism in such matters to the example of 
America. The keen-eyed Yankees distinguish more 
clearly than we do between the essential conditions of 
existence and the "stupid and vulgar accidents of 
human contrivance," and are consequently readier to lay 
irreverent hands on time-honoured abuses. If a balance 
could be struck between the influence of Europe on 
America and that of America on Europe, it is not by 
any means clear that the scale would descend in favour 
of the older world. 

There is a long list of influential witnesses in favour 
of the theory that the development of the democratic 
spirit is bound inevitably to hamper individuality 
and encourage mediocrity. De Tocqueville, Scherer, 
Renan, Maine, Bourget, Matthew Arnold, all lend the 
weight of their names to this conclusion. It does not 
seem to me that this theory is supported by the social 
facts of the United States. When we have made al- 
lowance for the absence of a number of picturesque 
phenomena which are due to temporal and physical 
conditions, and would be equally lacking if the country 
were an autocracy or oligarchy, there remains in the" 



zSo The Land of Contrasts 

United States greater room for the development of idio- 
syncrasy than, perhaps, in any other country. It has 
been paradoxically argued by an English writer that 
individualism could not reach its highest point except 
in a socialistic community ; i.e.^ that the unbridled 
competition of the present day drives square pegs into 
round holes and thus forces the individual, for the sake 
of bread and butter, to do that which is foreign to his 
nature ; whereas in an ideal socialism each individual 
would be encouraged to follow his own bent and develop 
his own special talent for the good of the community. 
To a certain extent this seems true of the United States. 
The career there is more open to the talents ; the world 
is an oyster which the individual can open with many 
kinds of knives ; what the Germans call " umsatteln,'' 
or changing one's profession as one changes one's horse, 
is much more feasible in the New World thaii, in the Old. 
The freedom and largeness of opportunity is a stimulus 
to all strong minds. Lincoln, as Professor Dowden 
remarks, would in the Middle Ages have probably con- 
tinued to split rails all his life. 

The fact is that if the predominant power of a few 
great minds is diminished in a democracy, it is because, 
together with such minds, a thousand others are at work 
contributing to the total result. . . . It is surely for the 
advantage of the most eminent minds that they should be 
surrounded by men of energy and intellect, who belong 
neither to the class of hero-worshippers nor to the class of 
valets-de-chamhre. 

The truth seems to be that with an increased population 
and the multiplicity of interests and influences at play on 



c 



I? 

1 07 



fiD- 



The American Note 281 

men, we may expect a greater diversity of mental types in the 
future than could be found at any period in the past. The 
supposed uniformity of society in a democratic age is appar- 
ent, not real ; artificial distinctions are replaced by natural 
differences ; and within the one great community exists a vast 
number of smaller communities, each having its special in- 
tellectual and moral characteristics. In the few essentials 
of social order the majority rightly has its way, but within 
certain broad bounds, which are fixed, there remains ample 
scope for the action of a multitude of various minorities. — 
" New Studies in Literature,''^ hy Prof. E. Doivden. 

The so-called uniformity and monotony of American 
life struck me as existing in appearance much more 
than in reality. If all my ten neighbours have pretty 
much the same income and enjoy pretty much the same 
comforts, their little social circle is certainly in a sense 
much more uniform than if their incomes ranged down 
from X 10,000 to £300 and their household state from 
several powdered footmen to a little maid- of -all- work ; 
but surely in all that really matters — in thoughts, ideas, 
personal habits and tastes, internal storms and calms, 
the elements of tragedy and comedy, talents and ambi- 
tions, loves and fears — the former circle might be infi- 
nitely more varied than the latter. Many critics of 
American life seem to have been led away by merely 
external similarities, and to have jumped at once to the 
conclusion that one Philadelphian must be as much like 
another as each little red-brick, white-stooped house of 
the Quaker City is like its neighbours. A single glance 
at the enormous number of intelligent faces one sees in 
American society, or even in an American street, is 



The Land of Contrasts 



enough to dissipate the idea that this can be a country 
of greater monotony than, say, England, where expres- 
sionless faces are by no means uncommon, even in the 
best circles. America is more monotonous than England, 
if a more equitable distribution of material comforts be 
monotony ; it is not so, if the question be of originality 
of character and susceptibility to ideas. 



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